Twitter co-founder says Elon Musk ‘doesn’t seem like’ the right person to own company

Elon Musk is the chief executive of companies like Tesla and SpaceX

Asked if Elon Musk is the right person to run Twitter, the company’s co-founder Biz Stone said, “It doesn’t seem like it right now, but I could be wrong.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Stone said that company culture, content policies and morale all took a hit under the leadership of Elon Musk, who acquired the social media giant in a $44 billion deal in October 2022.

Biz Stone co-founded Twitter in 2006 with Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Noah Glass, and worked there for about six years. He returned to the company in 2017, saying at that time that his focus was to “guide the company culture.”

He told The Guardian in a recent interview that he was able to make improvements to morale and content moderation during his second stint at Twitter – but the changes had been undone by Musk.

“We made a lot of improvements in those areas. And that’s all gone now,” said Stone.

Elon Musk has come under fire from various quarters for several decisions he took after acquiring Twitter. Among the most controversial was his decision to make job cuts in trust and safety team that handled global content moderation. Workers on teams handling the social network’s misinformation policy, global appeals and state media on the platform were also eliminated, Bloomberg had reported back in December 2022.

Musk had also faced backlash for temporarily banning the Twitter accounts of a handful of journalists and re-instating the accounts of people who had earlier been banned from the platform.