Musk’s Counterproductive Moves

What a time to be a tech business reporter! Even as Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud trial gets underway, our scoop yesterday about AI startup Anthropic’s rising valuation suggests that the disgraced FTX founder may have scored at least one home run with his Anthropic investment. Yes, that’s right: The fast-evolving story about AI startups has converged with the SBF drama. The big question is how much money FTX’s creditors can make from the sale of the Anthropic stake.

Meanwhile, in a slower-moving but still fascinating drama—Elon Musk’s adventures at X (which the rest of us call Twitter)—the banks that lent Musk the money to buy the company meet tomorrow with CEO Linda Yaccarino for an update, The Financial Times reported last week. Our deep dive today into X’s plans for shopping and sports provide some insight into how Musk and Yaccarino are hoping to rebuild the business. But the story also highlights one point about Musk’s management that doesn’t get enough attention. It shows how his destruction of Twitter’s business since the takeover a year ago wasn’t just a result of advertisers fleeing out of distaste for the hateful content he allowed back on the platform. It’s also because Musk got rid of teams responsible for bringing in revenue. That’s a sign of how incompetently Musk has run the company.