Musk’s Xperiment Disaster🔥

Jan 26

Elon Musk’s behavior recently reminded me of a song I’ve had on heavy rotation: Getting Away with It. It pains me to berate someone at the top of the tech industry, as the impact of poor leadership affects everyone in the industry, myself included.

His leadership at X feels like an experiment gone wrong, and not the kind of data-driven test I’d expect from a (certified by Joe Rogan) genius.

Hardcore, You Know The Score

When Musk went for a hardcore culture when he took over Twitter I thought it was bad for software engineers and software engineering as a whole.

I have always felt that working strict artificial deadlines comes at the expense of employees’ mental health and produces a short-term gain that is not sustainable in the long term. Burnout leads to a high turnover rate, lack of institutional knowledge, and difficulty hiring, which leads to under-resourced teams (as I’ve seen at Revolut).

In the case of X and Musk I secretly believed the hype. Musk is a clever guy (even a genius) who would test his assumptions, gather data, and refine the approach like in an A/B test. Yet what Musk did with X was the equivalent of running an A-test with no B, no control group, and no regard for the actual outcome. He fired most of the staff, declared a “hardcore” work culture, and assumed things would magically work out.

The results are in. The strategy has failed, and worse there is no sign of a course correction.

Those Results in full

Musk has called the revenue situation at Twitter/X to be dire from pretty much the moment he took over. That hasn’t stopped him shedding users and advertising spend through a right-wing lurch that is seemingly incompatible with a vision to turn X into a financial platform (when did the Bank of America last make a political statement?).

Now, with banks scrambling to offload the $13 billion in debt used to finance the acquisition, even Musk has been forced to admit in an internal email that:

User growth is stagnant
Revenue is unimpressive
X is barely breaking even

Meaning that the gamble with Twitter’s future isn’t paying off. The current result of the strategy inacted by Musk is a company that’s bleeding money, losing relevance, and stuck in a death spiral of bad decisions.

An Admission from Musk?

I’m a software developer (hence the name “The Secret Developer”) and I want to keep out of political discourse, apart from a debate about tabs vs. spaces. I don’t see why the CEO of X doesn’t do the same and let people on the platform do the talking rather than becoming the main event himself. The problem is the misplaced emphasis away from a technical solution into a political one.

So in an alarming email from Musk this month to X employees he mentioned the political power of X,

“…we’ve witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes”

with a similar focus to the financial dire straits the company finds itself in.

“Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.”

It’s (to understate it) an issue. Remember that Musk also said that the company could become cash-flow positive within months years ago? It all feels like a fever dream at this point.

The Issue

Musk fired half the company overnight, scrapped key teams, and changed core policies on a whim. He introduced a chaotic, overworked culture with no clear endgame. And when the data didn’t show a miraculous turnaround? He just kept doubling down.

This isn’t innovation. It’s just reckless arrogance dressed up as disruption, and the result of this strategy is a misfiring company.

Software engineers who stayed found themselves overworked, understaffed, and dealing with constant instability. If the point was to make X more efficient, why gut the teams responsible for trust & safety, infrastructure, and advertiser relations? If the goal was to make X more innovative, why did layoffs wipe out entire product divisions? Companies that behave this way suffer the consequences, as X is right now.

When Leadership Ignores the System

Any good engineer knows that systems fail when you don’t think through dependencies.

Musk removed human moderators, thinking AI would replace them. (It didn’t.)
He destroyed advertiser trust, thinking subscription revenue would cover it. (It hasn’t.)
He bet on free speech absolutism, only to realize that advertisers don’t want their brands next to hate speech. (Who could have guessed?)
He destroyed developer goodwill by treating them as expendable production units that can be replaced anytime for any reason.

This isn’t just bad leadership, it’s bad engineering practices.

A vision for X of chaotic reinvention, where everything is broken before something useful emerges is a poor engineering environment. Sure, it could work but without measuring success properly, and without valuing the people who build the system, if it does happen to work that’s chance rather than leadership excellence.

I start to believe that X is a company struggling to justify its own existence.

The Cult of Musk is Just Bad for Tech

If Musk were a junior developer, no one would take this approach seriously. No engineer would propose gutting a system’s core functionality and hoping for the best. No data scientist would recommend making huge changes without measuring their impact and hoping for the best.

But Musk isn’t held to the same standard. His cult of personality lets him ignore best practices while still being seen as a genius. The reality? His approach to X is a failure of the engineering culture.

The worst part? Big tech keeps letting him get away with it, and that’s were poor practices start and propagate into the wider tech culture.

Conclusion

Musk’s Twitter was an engineering failure at scale. He approached X with no plan, no real experimentation, and no respect for the people who make things work. He burned the system down and called it innovation.

The real lesson? Tech needs fewer cult leaders and more actual leaders. The industry won’t survive if we keep treating reckless arrogance as genius.

The Secret Developer