Some billionaires buy newspapers, magazines and sports teams. Elon Musk is trying to buy a social network that he admits could make much of the world hate him.
“Everyone is still going to blame me for everything,” Musk said during an onstage interview at the TED conference on Thursday. “If I acquire Twitter and something goes wrong, it’s 100% my fault. I think there will be some mistakes.”
It looks promising. So why exactly does the richest man in the world – who already runs several companies with ambitious goals like getting humans to Mars – wants to buy Twitter, a social media platform that, for all its benefits, is facing scrutiny by content issues like hate speech and disinformation, and also struggling to reignite user growth?
Musk has repeatedly emphasized in recent days that his goal is to bolster free speech on the platform and work to “unlock” Twitter’s “extraordinary potential.”
Others have suggested he may be more interested in raising attention for himself, whether the deal passes or not.
Twitter’s leadership, shareholders and employees must now reflect on this issue after Musk’s impressive bid on Thursday to acquire all the shares in Twitter he does not own, valued at $41.4 billion.
The offer capped a 10-day period during which Musk revealed he had become the company’s largest shareholder, accepted a board position only to walk away from it, and tweeted about how Twitter might be dying and should consider dropping the “w”. his name, among other suggestions.
Even by Twitter standards — a company that has faced executive turnover, public interest from potential buyers, and no lack of external scrutiny — Musk’s pressure is high.
Inside Twitter, longtime employees are used to dealing with big changes, said Jenna Golden, who led the company’s political sales team in Washington from 2012 to 2017. She believes many are keeping their heads down and trusting their leaders. to help weather the storm. But Musk’s wobbles can make focusing difficult.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal appeared to allude to this difficulty in a memo on Sunday, in which he wrote, “there will be distractions ahead.” After a general meeting Agrawal held with the team on Thursday afternoon, however, some employees took to Twitter to express frustration at the lack of response about what Musk’s offer could mean for them and the suggestion that they should continue working during the interruption.
The company now appears to be bracing for what could be a protracted takeover drama. Twitter’s board of directors is said to be evaluating its options, according to reports in the New York Times and others about the general meeting on Thursday.
One such option could be implementing a defensive tactic known as the “poison pill,” which would give other shareholders the right to buy shares cheaply, effectively diluting Musk’s equity stake and potentially forcing him to the negotiating table.
Even so, there seem to be sincere doubts about whether Musk, a successful but sometimes erratic entrepreneur who ended up in trouble with regulators in 2018 after falsely suggesting he had secured funding to take Tesla private, is serious about it. move forward with the agreement.
Despite being the richest man in the world, there are questions about how he would get the money to finance the nearly $42 billion deal. Musk himself admitted on Thursday that closing a deal would be a challenge, saying, “I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to acquire it.”
Twitter shares fluctuated a bit on Thursday but remained mostly flat, closing around $45, well below Musk’s offer price of $54.20 a share. The lack of enthusiasm – unusual after a takeover bid – suggests investor skepticism about the deal.
Twitter declined to comment on this story and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Musk’s stated plans for Twitter
To hear Musk say, the purpose of his Twitter offering is nothing less than protecting civilization as we know it.
“This is not a way to make money,” Musk said at the TED conference. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is both extremely credible and widely inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”
Among Musk’s plans for the platform are making its algorithm open source and also making it more transparent to users when, for example, a tweet is emphasized or demoted in his feed.
He also said on Thursday that he would like to have more lenient content moderation policies. “I think we want to be very reluctant to delete things and just be very cautious with permanent bans; timeouts are better,” Musk said.
However, it’s not clear that their plans are very different from Twitter’s existing strategy. While Twitter’s algorithm isn’t currently open source — a term that describes code that’s publicly available for anyone to see — Twitter leaders have expressed support for moving in that direction, and the company often makes it clear when it’s downgrading certain tweets or types of content.
Twitter also erred in labeling, rather than completely removing, much of the content often considered problematic, including some types of misinformation. And it offers several short suspensions for users who violate its rules before removing them.
In some cases, Musk’s expressed desire for more freedom of expression on the platform also seems to contradict his other goals and past actions.
During his interview on Thursday, shortly after saying that he would like to preserve as much legal speech as possible and would be hesitant to remove users from the platform, Musk said that another of his top priorities would be to limit “spam and scam bots, and bot armies that are [no] Twitter”, accounts that, while certainly a nuisance, are nonetheless a nice speech.
Musk had also previously attempted to remove a Twitter account dedicated to tracking the movements of his private jet, offering to pay the college freshman who ran the account (the account owner declined).
“A desperate attempt by Musk to get attention”
Other followers of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO have suggested that Musk’s takeover bid has more to do with polishing his own reputation and preserving his voice on his favorite platform.
Musk has long used Twitter to build his brand and communicate with his more than 80 million followers, and troll those he sees as his detractors. In that context, his offer would be in keeping with a long history of wealthy individuals buying up media properties as a way of sustaining their image.
“Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter is a desperate attempt by Musk to get attention,” David Trainer, CEO of research firm New Constructs, said in an investment note Thursday. “He’s only offering to buy Twitter because Twitter is where Musk is most popular.”
Some Twitter users pointed out that even Musk’s offer price, $54.20 a share, contained the number “420,” one that Musk is known to use to make cannabis jokes.
What Musk Will Do Next
Musk said in his Thursday letter to Twitter that if the board rejects his offer, he “would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” a move that could send Twitter’s stock plummeting.
He later hinted on his Twitter feed that he could also make life harder for the Twitter board if they resisted his offer, with not-so-vague suggestions of litigation and mobilizing other shareholders.
“If the current board of Twitter takes actions contrary to the interests of shareholders, they would be violating their fiduciary duty,” Musk said on Twitter Thursday night. “The responsibility they would assume would be titanic in scale.”
Musk had previously asked on Twitter if a new social media platform is needed, and he could, if his bid for Twitter fails, “attempt to raise the capital necessary to create a similar social media platform to compete with Twitter,” he said. analyst Ali Mogharabi in an investor note on Thursday. But Mogharabi added that it can be a “difficult task” to attract “millions of daily active users, as Twitter did in late 2021”.
If Donald Trump’s new social media platform, Truth Social, which has been struggling to get off the ground, is any guide, internet users aren’t necessarily clamoring for a new platform that claims to be a free speech alternative for big business. technology.
If the deal goes through, Musk could change everything from Twitter platform policies to its workplace culture, said Golden, the former employee, who described the billionaire as “incredibly unpredictable” and “a loose cannon.”
The prospect of even more turmoil than usual, she added, “creates concern and anxiety for people about things changing: ‘What’s that going to be like? Will this affect our internal experience? How will this be seen in the outside world?’
Twitter’s culture is known for being inclusive and friendly, she said. “With someone like Musk running the show, it puts a lot of that in question.”
Source: CNN Brasil
I am Sophia william, author of World Stock Market. I have a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and I have worked as a reporter for several news websites. I have a passion for writing and informing people about the latest news and events happening in the world. I strive to be accurate and unbiased in my reporting, and I hope to provide readers with valuable information that they can use to make informed decisions.
