I bought Bitcoin a few years ago and I used to follow Twitter a lot, but ever since Elon acquired it everything changed. I want to understand how that process went down and what were the main changes he made. Can someone explain the full story to me?
Do you want to know exactly when it happened and what changes there were, or more how it affected the platform overall?
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for around 44 billion dollars, and from day one he started making drastic changes: he fired nearly half the staff, implemented the paid verification system (Twitter Blue), changed the algorithms to prioritize content, and got rid of tons of moderation rules that used to exist. The platform became pretty chaotic, with more spam and bots, and a lot of users left for other networks like Bluesky or Threads because they felt the quality dropped massively.
What a lot of people don't mention is that Musk fired nearly half the workforce in the first few weeks, which seriously hurt content moderation and maintenance. Beyond the obvious changes like the paid verification system (Twitter Blue), he changed the algorithm to prioritize raw engagement over quality, which filled the platform with bots and more polarizing content. Advertising tanked because a lot of major brands paused spending out of fear of being associated with controversial content, and that put the platform in a pretty serious financial hole during the first years under his management.
The $44 billion figure is correct, but the whole layoff situation was messier than it looks: he didn't just cut moderation staff, a ton of engineers and technical people who kept the infrastructure running also left, which made the platform pretty unstable for months. On top of that he rolled out radical changes like the paid verification system (Twitter Blue), drastically cut API access for outside developers, and changed the recommendation algorithms, which completely changed how the timeline looked for most users.
What some people don't mention is that all this happened while Musk was trying to finance the purchase with debt, so he was under constant pressure to make it profitable fast. The result was kind of a domino effect: some users moved to platforms like Bluesky, others just spent less time there, and advertising took a hit because a lot of brands didn't want to be in such an uncertain place. It's not like Twitter collapsed completely, but it definitely lost relevance compared to before.
After the purchase, all hell broke loose: Musk went in with the knife, no holds barred - changed the verification system (those blue checkmarks became paid), drastically cut back moderation, and the platform became way more toxic overall. If you want to keep up with what's happening there without scrolling all day, what actually works is setting up specific lists of people you actually follow or using external tools like TweetDeck to filter by keywords, so you only see what matters to you and skip all the noise.
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