Exactly one year ago, Elon Musk shocked the tech world by putting in a bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion. In signature Musk fashion, that figure worked out at $54.20 a share.

That offer led, months later, to an actual acquisition, and eventually, to the situation we’re now in—one where news organizations are being contentiously labeled as government-funded and many users remain baffled by the value proposition of the Twitter Blue subscription service plan. In short, after one year and several thousand layoffs, Musk has made Twitter immeasurably worse, according to former staff members and analysts.

“The last 12 months have made clear that millions of dollars and a very large ego are not adequate to manage the complexities of a social media platform, if you haven’t dealt with those issues before,” says Edward Perez, a former director of product management at Twitter whose focus was civic integrity. Perez left the company in September 2022.

Perez’s claim was on full display earlier this week, when Musk participated in a hastily arranged interview with the BBC (on Twitter Spaces, of course) where he claimed hate speech isn’t an issue for the platform. “What hate speech are you talking about?,” he asked BBC journalist James Clayton incredulously.

But some ex-employees disagree with Musk’s dismissal of hate speech as a serious issue. “Twitter’s content moderation has moved from a carefully considered, policy-driven standard adopted by most large corporations, and which some considered too strict, to a policy largely driven by the whims of its CEO,” says Melissa Ingle, a former senior data scientist at Twitter who focused on content moderation. Ingle was let go from the company in late 2022. Indeed, research published earlier this month showed hate speech has increased since Musk took charge at Twitter.

The former product director Perez, for his part, believes that Twitter is “in a more fragile place than it was 12 months ago.” “There are numerous accounts of specific reasons why the reliability is not what it used to be,” he says. “From a business standpoint, the loss of advertisers and revenue is a serious problem.”

More damning than that, he adds, is the loss of trust with long-term Twitter partners, key among them advertisers. Twitter lost half its top 1,000 advertisers between September 2022 and January 2023, according to data from digital marketing analysis firm Sensor Tower

And it’s not just advertisers who have seemingly grown tired of Musk’s act; users appear to be getting bored, too. According to a survey released in January, the number of U.S.-based Twitter users dropped some 9% since Musk acquired the company. “The platform and its owner and now the butt of many jokes in regards to social media, and Twitter has become an object of ridicule,” says social media analyst Matt Navarra. “I think that his legacy of chaos and uncertainty will continue to damage any value that’s left in the brand of Twitter.”

And while Musk has promised to step down as CEO once he finds a suitable replacement, Navarra worries the leadership change will be too little, too late. “I think what it would take for Twitter to turn the ship around is something that Elon Musk is constitutionally incapable of,” says Perez. “That would be for him to intentionally choose to get his own personal voice and personal ego out of the way, and get back to hiring and using trusted and trained and serious professionals, who understand the complexities of social media policy and business.”