Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, is pushing so many changes to the social-media site so quickly that high-profile users, fans of Musk, and even some of his investors are complaining.
Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor whose VC fund, Andreessen Horowitz, put $400 million of equity backing into Musk's takeover of Twitter, complained directly to Musk regarding the numerous changes to the site, particularly the mobile feed, in recent weeks, according to two people familiar with the company. Internally, the site is now monitoring Andreessen's feed, in part to ensure that he has a better user experience, the people familiar said.
Representatives of Twitter and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to requests for comment.
Andreessen is one of the latest prominent figures to have complained about Twitter's glitches. Other people who have publicly complained include Nikita Bier, a cofounder of the social-media site Gas; Mike Solana, the vice president of Founders Fund; and even far-right conservative accounts, many of whom have hailed Musk's ownership of Twitter as a needed correction to the site's alleged liberal tone. Ben Shapiro, and Tim Pool, and the account Libs of TikTok have all recently complained.
Complaints from Andreessen and others have prompted Musk to start tweeting publicly about issues the site is experiencing, like tweets from private accounts going viral, icons that keep moving, an inability to post, and frequent glitches. Musk even admitted last week that after he changed his display name to "Mr. Tweet," he could not change it back.
"Something fundamental is wrong," Musk wrote in one reply to a complaint about the site early this month. Then he decided to run his own "test" by making his account private since so many users had complained that the feature, designed to keep peoples' Twitter interactions within their follower groups, were getting either no engagement at all or huge amounts of exposure because they would show up in public feeds.
"Musk knows it's bad right now, but it's going to get better over time," a person familiar with Twitter said. Many employees are working 80-hour weeks or more at Twitter to enact changes, the person added.
A 'graceful decline'
Many of the issues Twitter has experienced stem from an expansion of testing, according to the people familiar. Musk is trying to boost engagement on the app through various tweaks and has the site running tests on how users engage with content the site can share with advertisers. Normally, Twitter performs such tests on a small, random group of users. Musk has demanded that Twitter conduct these tests on as large a group of users as possible, which is about 10% of Twitter's roughly 250 million daily users.
Musk communicates about glitches that need to fixing by sending engineers emailed screenshots of complaint tweets or glitches that he sees himself, the people familiar said. This sends employees scrambling to figure out what is wrong and try to fix it, which can sometimes create even more problems.
An inability to quickly correct glitches and broken features is an expected impact of Musk's drastic and continual cost-cutting at Twitter. The platform now has less than 600 engineers, down from several thousand prior to Musk's takeover. The total headcount will likely dip below 2,000 employees as offices close and layoffs continue on a rolling basis.
"It would normally not be hard to reverse these things," a former executive previously told Insider. "But now it will take days or weeks to actually figure it out."
One former employee noted that the continued glitches show that Twitter is beginning a "graceful decline" that is unlikely to reverse with so few people left to fix problems as they come up. Another former worker said Twitter may go the way of Myspace, which still has millions of profiles, but is a site of the past.
"Dead is different than down," the person said.
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