The soap opera of the sale of Twitter: Elon Musk has finally bought the company for the 44,000 million dollars that he initially offered. But another soap opera may start about the future of the social network and what Musk wants to do with it. Because he has not wasted time and as soon as he set foot in the company’s headquarters as its owner, the first thing he has done is fire several of his main managers. A minimum of four of them, according to the New York Times, have been expelled, and at least one has had to be escorted out of the company’s headquarters.
The laid off are Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal; his CFO, Ned Segal; Your Head of the Legal Department, Vijaya Gadde (who apparently made the decision to suspend Trump’s account) and its General Counsel, Sean Edgett. It is very likely that they are not the only ones, because Musk has already warned that many changes are coming in the company. In view of the layoffs, he will start by changing his leadership, but he has also announced new systems to get income, and of course, layoffs.
In fact, just a few days ago he announced that he was going to lay off 75% of the Twitter workforce, which is currently made up of more than 7,500 people, although he ended up retracting and assuring the company’s workers that he was not going to lay off 75% . Still, most workers are likely to have to find another job. About 700 have not wanted to wait. They are the ones who have been leaving their posts since June to join other companies. It will probably take us a short time to know how many more will come out, although this time not of their own volition.
On the other hand, the closing of the agreement opens a period of uncertainty for Twitter. Musk assures that he is a «free speech absolutist«, and ensures that there is censorship on Twitter, particularly towards the most conservative opinions. What he now wants, it seems, is to turn the social network into a place with more space for comments of all kinds, something he plans to start doing by reversing the permanent blocking of many or all of the accounts that are suspended. Among them, the most controversial of all: that of Donald Trump.
What Musk thinks about freedom of expression on Twitter could, depending on how he manages it, amplify the network’s toxic content problems, and therefore affect political debates on networks around the world. world. Meanwhile, Republicans in the United States, just days before their mid-term elections, celebrate the closing of the operation, stressing that censorship will soon end.
We will see, however, what all this is. Several researchers have pointed out that Twitter’s rules have been essential in combating misinformation and hate speech online. Advertisers have not wasted time either, and there are already brands that assure that as soon as they return the account to Trump, they will withdraw their advertising from the platform. Others are concerned that ads for their products may appear alongside controversial tweets.
Another of the big changes that Elon Musk plans is to turn Twitter into a private company, and take it out of the stock market. In this way, Musk will be able to do and undo as he pleases without having to explain himself to shareholders, as is the case now. It is the preliminary step to be able, according to him, to solve all the company’s problems, which are not only related to censorship, the toxic environment and misinformation. The social network has been having problems getting new users and growing for quite some time. Not only that, but also the most active users gradually stop using it. Nor does he manage to increase his income in an appreciable and notable way.
But even so, its new owner is convinced that it has tremendous potential, and as he assured last April, when he made his purchase offer, he wants «work with the company and its user community to unlock it«. Elon Musk is one of the most active users on the platform, with almost 110 million followers.
He began racking up Twitter shares this year. In April he made an offer to buy Twitter, which was accepted by its board of directors, and said he would lift the network’s content moderation policies, eliminate spam and add new features. He also promised more transparency about the algorithms used to promote content.
After a few weeks, however, he began to have doubts about the deal, only to withdraw the purchase offer shortly thereafter, claiming that his management had not accurately counted the platform’s spam accounts, and that he had been lied to. The response from the Twitter address was immediate, and they denounced Elon Musk before a Delaware court to force him to maintain the offer.
In addition, they accused him of trying to withdraw the purchase offer because the general economic situation had reduced his personal fortune. Musk had assured that he would put 33,000 million dollars out of his pocket of the 44,000 offered by Twitter, and it is evident that the worsening of his finances was not the best thing in the face of the outlay that the purchase of the platform would entail. A few days after the lawsuit was filed, Musk tried to negotiate and lower the purchase price of Twitter, but was unsuccessful.
Finally, earlier this month, it agreed to buy the network under the terms set out at the time of the offer last spring. The judge in charge of the case, therefore, postponed the hearing of the trial on this operation, initially scheduled for mid-October, to today the 28th, to see if the process was effectively closed, as it has finally happened.
Now it remains to be seen if Elon Musk achieves the goals he has for Twitter, to which he has assured that will become an “app for everything” called X. When he presented the purchase proposal to investors last spring, he said that the platform would achieve annual revenues of 26.4 billion dollars, and that by 2028 it would have 931 million users. An ambitious goal if we take into account the figures that it now offers 200 million users and 5,080 million dollars in revenue in 2021.
Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022
For now, as we have mentioned, the first thing Musk has done is reassure advertisers with a letter he sent them yesterday via Twitter. In it, he assures them that the social network cannot be turned into a hell where anyone can say what they want without consequences, and that Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world. We will see what happens in the coming weeks and months, although the first changes, and probably more layoffs, will surely not be long in coming.
