Elon Musk is battling a celebrity exodus, backlash from advertisers and new imposter accounts at Twitter. Photo / Getty Images
The last few weeks have not been good for the messiahs of the tech industry.
Tesla founder Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, overseeing the mass departure of staff and facing a barrage of criticism.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has faced an onslaught of questions after the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange.
And this all coincides with the news that Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for fraud.
Tech commentator Vaughn Davis, the founder of ad agency the Goat Farm, tells The Front Page podcast people didn’t get to where they were by themselves.
“The investors are just as complicit in creating this founders cult,” says Davis.
“They feel the need to say: ‘I’m behind this young person, I’m backing them, I’m creating them. They’re going to make us all rich.’ And then sometimes the founder is going to be put in a corner by that. And the pressure to deliver on that can be immense.” Davis says that while failures like Theranos or FTX might seem gradual, they rarely are.
“The shortcomings and the problems are hidden until they’re not.” Despite the lessons presented by Holmes and Bankman-Fried, Davis says that we’re unlikely to see the mythology of the founder as a messiah dying out any time soon.
“It’s fuelled by the desire of older, wealthy men, typically, to become even more wealthy and to associate themselves with something young and sexy. As long as those men have money and that desire, that’s not going to change. They’re going to keep identifying and backing these founders and they’re going to keep popping up. And nine out of ten of them are going to fail.”
Musk is certainly further along this track than most, having forged a long career in the tech industry off the back of his early success at PayPal.
But his audacious acquisition of Twitter points to the fact that he may have drunk the Kool-Aid himself and bought into the idea of his own brilliance a bit too much.
The question now is whether he will be able to turn Twitter around as he has promised his founders or whether we’re simply staring down the barrel of yet another impending tech failure.
So will Twitter fail? And if it does will that necessarily be a bad thing?
Listen to The Front Page podcast for Davis’ view on why Twitter might be worth keeping around.
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