Recent information has it that Elon Musk has finally bought 100 per cent stake in Twitter for approx. $44 billion, around $54.20 per share, and all of it in cash.
The microblogging site has been evaluating Musk’s offer for the past several weeks. Musk previously said that Twitter has “extraordinary potential” and he wants to unlock it all.
Earlier this month, Musk purchased a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter. This made him the second-biggest shareholder in the company, the first one being Vanguard with 10.3 per cent stake in the company. Later, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal welcomed Musk to be a part of the board but the billionaire rejected the offer. The tussle between Elon and Twitter has been going on since then.
It all started last month when Musk asked users on Twitter if he should launch a new social media platform since Twitter doesn’t “adhere to right to free of speech”. To which, most users said that he should buy Twitter instead. The Tesla CEO also complained that Twitter suppresses the right to free speech, which is believed to be the first thing he would solve as the owner of Twitter.
In the past several years, the billionaire often questioned Twitter for censoring some voices, including former US President Donald Trump. In fact, there was a time when the platform accused Musk of violating Twitter’s terms and guidelines for tweeting information related to coronavirus. Since Musk has often talked about Twitter not adhering to “freedom of speech”, one of the first changes could be seen in content moderation.
Musk recently tweeted, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” Around 70 per cent of 2 million respondents replied with NO.
Secondly, with Musk becoming the owner of Twitter, we could get the edit button very soon. Though, Twitter has already confirmed to be testing the edit option. Earlier this month, the company said that it will test the edit option with Twitter Blue subscribers first, followed by a stable release. Musk could help in the early release of the edit button for sure.
One more area where Musk is expected actively work is to remove spam accounts or spambots, which as per him is Twitter’s “most annoying thing”. In the last few years, scammers impersonated Musk using fake accounts in an effort to get people to give away cryptocurrency. In 2020, Musk’s account was among high-profile Twitter accounts that were hacked to push a bitcoin scam.
The Tesla CEO recently said that the microblogging was spending time on profile pictures that showcase nonfungible tokens, assets verified on a blockchain, rather than fixing crypto spambots. “Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?” he said in one of the tweets.
Lastly, with Musk being the owner now, we could also see a more open-source Twitter. It is already an open-source platform to some extent since some of its techs are already publicly available. But during the recent TED conference, Musk said that Twitter should be more open source as “there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.”
