Tech's tectonic plates are shifting. Who'll survive?

Amid job losses and tumbling share prices, all the platforms once thought too big to fail are now fighting to stay relevant. From Twitter to Meta, change is afoot, says John Arlidge

- John Arlidge

WHEN Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s offices in San Francisco last month, on the day he finally plonked down $44 billion to buy the social media platform, he was carrying a sink. His message? “I’m going to throw everything at this company to fix it.” Today, some in Silicon Valley are joking that he might have been better off carrying in a toilet. Twitter and much of the rest of the tech sector are seeing profits, valuations and prospects for growth flushed away.

Twitter’s very existence seems under threat. Last week, imposters took advantage of the new premium verification system to set up parody accounts of everyone from Pope Francis to pharma giant and insulin maker Eli Lilly & Co. The Eli Lilly & Co fake account caused stocks in the company to tumble after it tweeted that insulin would now be free. This comes after many big firms feared that under Musk, a self-declared “free speech absolutist”, trolling and hate speech will proliferate, making the platform too risky a marketplace.

Also feeling the heat is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, formerly Facebook. He has cut his workforce by 11,000, or 13 per cent, in response to competition from rival platform TikTok and rising losses on investments in the metaverse, the nascent online 3D world.