The Simple Reason Jeff Bezos Is So Bad at Twitter and What Every Leader Can Learn from It

Jeff Bezos is arguably the most achieved entrepreneur of all time. He constructed 1 of the most vital businesses in the entire world, developed work for a lot more than a million people today, and turned a single of the richest people in the planet. He is evidently good at a whole lot of things. Twitter, even so, is not a single of them.

It can be not for a deficiency of trying. Ever due to the fact Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon, he appears to have some time on his arms, and he’s devoted a bunch of it to trolling President Biden and The White Household on Twitter.

Here’s a modern case in point, which, I feel is intended to be humorous?

Or this one, which I believe is supposed to be intelligent? 

This tweet is from this weekend, and it truly is primarily trolling, but the form of trolling you count on from someone who desires you to know he’s the smartest particular person in the class:

On the 1 hand, probably Bezos is making an attempt to make a stage about subject areas that are significant to him. If that is the case, an individual he trusts must notify him that Twitter is not the place. 

The issue is, Bezos isn’t really essentially wrong. He is a quite smart person and he appears to be prepared to simply call out terrible information and facts when he sees it. It is really just that no 1 particularly cares, at the very least, not on Twitter. 

Twitter just isn’t a nuanced tutorial conversation about crucial subjects. It can be an eighth-quality lunch area absolutely free-for-all. You really don’t score factors on Twitter with very well-imagined-out arguments. You rating points with poop emojis.

That is how Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to a tweet from Parag Agrawal, the existing CEO of Twitter, a firm he is striving to obtain. 

On the other hand, maybe Bezos thinks Twitter could be valuable for his individual brand name. For many years, Bezos’ personal model was section “smartest child in the class,” and aspect supervillain. It’s possible he is striving to use Twitter to transform that. Probably he thinks he can tweet his way to great.

Just after all, other mega-abundant personalities have weaponized Twitter for their possess reasons, none additional proficiently than the human being who knocked Bezos from the throne as world’s richest male, Elon Musk. Or, consider former President Donald Trump, who–irrespective of what you assume about him–realized particularly what he was doing on Twitter. 

Both have demonstrated a mastery of working with Twitter to bend the community discussion in their direction (Trump was forever banned from Twitter just after his comments in the course of the January 6, 2020 assault on the U.S. Capitol). Bezos has not even arrive shut.

The most basic reason is that, even with the reality Bezos is amazingly intelligent, he won’t have an understanding of both the medium or the audience. Most people just really don’t especially treatment what the former CEO of the world’s most significant on the web browsing web page thinks about gasoline rates or corporate taxes. That’s not the reason people today use Twitter. When he tweets about huge essential topics, it arrives throughout as uncomfortable and out of touch.

Here’s the lesson, by the way: The only reason to be great at Twitter is to make attention for on your own. The thing is, the kind of consideration you deliver on Twitter is shallow and fleeting, which indicates not only do you have to function at it consistently, the notice is genuinely all you get. Twitter awareness just about by no means translates into everything tangible.