- Benedict Evans said he’s leaving X, formerly Twitter, after 16 years of using it to help build his career.
- The former VC said he can no longer overlook X’s issues and Elon Musk’s chaotic leadership.
- X has faced an onslaught of criticism since Musk took over last year.
Former Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans said he’s ditching X, formerly known as Twitter, after 16 years on the platform because of his frustration with Elon Musk’s leadership.
Evans said in a post on his website that he’s built a “meaningful part” of his career on X since 2007, but he can’t overlook the issues on the platform any longer. To date, Evans has nearly 390,000 followers on X. He writes a weekly newsletter that has 175,000 subscribers, according to his website.
“The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision. The advertisers have fled, and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow,” Evans said of Musk’s takeover of the social media site. “It’s hard to see anyone who depends on having a long-term platform investing in anything that Twitter builds, when it might not be there tomorrow,” he added.
Since Musk took the company private last year, the site has had its fair share of technical difficulties, from Spaces breaking during Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch to error codes on images and links and post limits. The company has also introduced several new features over the past year, including video live streaming and new rules for verification.
The former venture capitalist said that there was initially hope that Musk would take Twitter from a company that had “drifted aimlessly” to a tech company full of innovation and new product ideas. But he wrote that he now feels there is a fundamental lack of understanding on Musk’s part about where the company is going.
“It turns out that social networks are harder than rocket science,” Evans wrote, pointing out that what has worked for Musk at his other companies doesn’t seem to work at Twitter after previously dubbing the billionaire a “bullshitter who delivers.” After all, Musk has been promising self-driving electric cars for the better part of a decade, Evans wrote.
“Tesla has sometimes been run in chaos as well, but the pain of that is on the employees, not the customers: you can’t wake up in the middle of the night and decide the car should have five wheels and ship that the next day, but you can make those kinds of decisions in software, and Elon Musk does, all the time,” Evans wrote. “Perhaps it’s a fundamental failure to understand how you run a community. Or something else. But whatever the explanation, Twitter now feels like the Brewster’s Millions of tech – ‘Watch One Man Turn $40bn Into $4 In 24 Months!'”
Evans also pointed to instances of misinformation and anti-Semitism on the site. Musk denied the site promotes anti-Semitism and misinformation last month after a report from the Anti-Defamation League alleged rising levels of “virulent antisemitism” on X.
“Most of what you see at Tesla or SpaceX really is his creation – but half of what he says is bullshit,” Evans wrote. “Until recently, though, the bullshit was mostly about cars or tunnels. It wasn’t repeating obvious anti-semitic dog-whistles.”
Evans and a spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication.
Evans is far from the first person to threaten to leave the social media site since Musk took over. When the billionaire first took Twitter private last year, several celebrities took to the platform to announce their departure. Though, some appeared to come back to the site later on.
Lots of advertisers also fled the site following Musk’s takeover, though X CEO Linda Yaccarino and Musk have repeatedly said advertisers are returning to the platform. However, Insider’s Lara O’Reilly reported on Monday that many of the biggest advertises in the world had also stopped purchasing ads on the site in recent months.
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