What Elon, Kim K, and Biden have in common... All got Twitter-hacked on Wednesday. It started with an Elon tweet (doesn't it always?). But this Elon tweet was almost too strange: "doubling all payments sent to my Bitcoin address." Then the Bitcoin-scammy tweets started coming from Bill Gates. Then came a wave of Bitcoin-scammy tweets from: Barack, Jeff Bezos, Kanye, Apple, and Uber (among others). Then, there was silence...
Yet this could have gone 100000X worse... Twitter is at the very heart of breaking news, government policy, and market-moving comms. President Trump's account wasn't hacked, but this breach makes you wonder if it could be. Imagine the market and political response if the hackers had sent...
The Twitter trust is bruised... However this hack was orchestrated, it reveals that Twitter was/is vulnerable. Now the world is questioning the security of its systems. Lawmakers are knocking down Twitter's door to get clarity on how this could happen and why it wasn't stopped sooner (it took hours to block compromised accounts). Some public figures/companies might even quit Twitter as their go-to platform for breaking announcements. All of that would hurt user metrics, ad sales, and profits.