From Elon Musk’s Twitter To Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court

An excerpt from this week’s CxO Newsletter. Click here to sign up, and have a great week.

In 2009, I joined Twitter. I was happy to engage with audiences in new ways. Curiosity is what drives me as a journalist. But I wasn’t interested in becoming a brand. I knew all too well how easily brands could become a target or fad, a casualty of bad judgment or a misplaced joke. I thought of myself as the kind of reporter who’d slip under a velvet rope to reach the VIP area or fly coach for 13 hours because she’d yelled “seat sale” when pitching her editor—in other words, the kind who’d get a great story because she wasn’t a brand.

Getting “verified” with a blue check mark felt less like a badge of honor back then than a reminder to watch my words. Sure, there were perks. When my Twitter account was hacked in Moscow a few years later, being verified made the “support” person reverse her suggestion to just kill my account and start again. And that blue check made it easier to figure out which accounts I could trust.

Would I pay $20 a month to keep it, as Twitter’s newly-minted owner and CEO Elon Musk allegedly is planning to do? No. I suspect the platform’s value will diminish quickly if its new owner doesn’t appreciate that trust works best when it’s earned, not bought. If Musk thinks it’s okay to fire people without cause and circulate conspiracy theories just to stir the pot, he’ll discover soon enough that trust isn’t a feature but a foundation.

GM and Ford have already put ads on hold. Hate speech is rising and verified users like producer Shonda Rhimes are starting to drop out. Author Stephen King said “they should pay me” – which prompted Musk to suggest a price of $8 instead.

That said, Twitter is still a powerful platform. Actor Kit Connor “came back for a minute” to rach his audience while Hubspot cofounder and CTO Dharmesh Shah tweeted “Woo hoo!” when he hit 300,000 followers yesterday.

When I first interviewed Elon Musk in 2011, he told me he “never really wanted to run companies.” To conquer Mars and electric cars, he felt running Tesla and SpaceX was a necessity. He’s running Twitter because he was forced to buy it. Maybe he’s playing us a bit for publicity. Maybe he will invest in the platform and find better ways than a blue check to verify who’s on it. Maybe a guy who’s called himself ‘Chief Twit’ and now “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator’ is looking for someone else to don the CEO hat.

As my colleagues report, employees are freaking out. But if business is a multidimensional probabilistic chessboard, as Musk likes to describe it, let’s leave room for the possibility that this might turn out well. As I said (in a tweet, of course), my concern about Twitter’s future is mixed with curiosity as Musk likes to build and has a sense of humor–which gave dogecoin a hefty lift. We will no doubt be debating it at the Forbes CMO Summit this week in Miami, and for months to come.

What’s Next:

Cybersecurity Alert: When states spent millions to protect their Covid unemployment plans with Deloitte’s anti-fraud systems but fraudsters may have earned billions in exploiting them, we have a problem.

Empowered Workers: As Kweilin Ellingrud of the McKinsey Global Institute notes in her recent column, more U.S. workers are going it alone — and feeling good about it. If you want to keep them in house, executive coach Matthew Smith cites data on the power of investing in career development.

Remember the self-driving car? Alan Ohnsman reports that Argo AI, Ford’s venture with Volkswagen, is shutting down. Amid all the turmoil around self-driving technology, it’s worth noting that Waymo is expanding its robotaxi service to Phoenix Airport.

Books worth reading: Journalist Jon Hilsenrath has a fascinating book out today on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. In a conversation with Forbes, he talks about her politics and her legacy while saying he ended up covering a love story. Another remarkable read for business leaders (and anyone else) is The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel of LinkedIn. Hempel talks about the commonalities in how people come out as LGBTQ+, the poignant experience in her family, and the troubling times we live in. Both are friends and former colleagues but I read both books to the end and thoroughly enjoyed them.

Supreme Court Consequences: With the Supreme Court likely to end affirmative action, companies are bracing for the impact on talent pipelines and programs. The number of women living more than an hour away from an abortion clinic has doubled in the aftermath of its recent decision to overturn Roe V. Wade. If you’re curious about Justice Clarence Thomas’s experience with affirmative action at Holy Cross, you might want to read my book Fraternity, with apologies for that shameless plug. When I recalled how Thomas talked about the difference that Father John Brooks made in his life while thinking about the lives of others he now has in his hands, it inspired me to put those comments in a tweet.