The billionaire called for a range of changes, from relaxing Twitter content restrictions to rooting out fake accounts.
Initially, the story between Elon Musk and Twitter seemed like a tale of unrequited love.
The unlikely couple began their relationship with a power imbalance.
Elon Musk loves Twitter. The South African-born billionaire has a staggering 83.9 million followers on the social network. He tweets prolifically, sometimes controversially or catastrophically.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a federal agency for regulating and controlling financial markets, even banned him from posting about matters related to his automotive company Tesla after a tweet made the price. of the company’s shares plummeted by US$ 14 billion.
He was also sued for defamation after a tweet in which he called British diver Vern Unsworth, who took part in the rescue operation of 12 boys trapped in a Thai cave in 2018, a “pedophile”.
But he never left the social network.
Twitter, on the other hand, is much less excited about Musk.
You’d think that if someone were to offer $44 billion for a 16-year-old business that hasn’t experienced the same exponential growth as its rivals, they’d be doing the company a favor — and Twitter’s shareholders seem to agree.
Musk says he wants to see Twitter reach its “extraordinary potential” and isn’t interested in making money from it. He already has an enormous fortune, and multibillionaires can afford to have different priorities.
Although a deal was closed on Monday (25/04), Twitter initially responded to Musk’s offer using a defensive approach, using as justification the fact that a single person cannot own more than 15% of his shares. .
Why?
Perhaps the board was unnerved by Musk’s statement that he wanted to see more “free speech” and less moderation on Twitter. Many Republicans, who have long felt that Twitter’s policies of moderation favor free expression of left-wing views, rejoiced.
But regulatory agencies around the world have been working to force social networks to take more responsibility for the content they display, issuing hefty fines for cases of sharing material that incites violence, is abusive or classified as hate speech, among other things. You can already hear the first alerts of concern.
We can’t forget about finances. Twitter’s core business model is ad-based – and Musk wants to change that.
He says he’s more interested in paid subscriptions, a model that can be difficult to sell in an environment where all the major social networks are free to use.
The idea is to allow Twitter users to decide whether they prefer their data not used for ads in exchange for a fee – but that’s just a gamble.
The billionaire is also interested in cryptocurrencies. Could he use the platform to encourage payments in volatile, unsecured currencies like Bitcoin?
And then there’s Musk himself. He is the richest man in the world, a serial entrepreneur whose successes include companies like PayPal and Tesla. He is charismatic and has no filters – which can make him quite unpredictable. He likes to test limits and break rules.
There’s a reason he refused to join Twitter’s board after buying 9.2% of the company’s shares in January – he didn’t want to be bound by any liability.
And he has an army of loyal fans who adore him. I once tweeted about the fact that because of the way his finances are structured (his wealth is largely stock-based rather than cash, and he doesn’t own property), he doesn’t pay income tax.
I received comments and responses asking me how dare I say that and that he was a brilliant man for whom we should be grateful.
He didn’t court Twitter with flowers and chocolates and instead made an aggressive offer from an aggressive businessman – no negotiation, no commitment.
It’s a private sale, by a private company, and it’s not a merger between two giants, so it’s unlikely there will be many regulatory hurdles.
Musk’s Twitter would be a very different scenario for the 300 million people who continue to use it, if at all. More daring, perhaps, and less liberal.
He could reinstate the account of Donald Trump, who is currently banned from the social network. And considering that the platform created by the former US president himself, Truth Social, doesn’t seem to be working, he would probably return to Twitter easily.
It is difficult to summarize the collective view of Twitter users. But according to my unscientific analysis, for every tweet welcoming Musk, there seems to be another one from a user threatening to leave the network.
But since when do Twitter users agree on anything?
