It’s official: Elon Musk buys Twitter after paying a whopping $44 billion and only a few hours before the end of the term granted by Judge Kathaleen McCormick’s resolution, which had to be issued to put an end to a purchase operation turned into a ‘soap opera’.
And the operation has been chaotic. Twitter sued Musk in July after the Tesla and SpaceX leader said he wanted to back out of buying the company for $54.20 a share. Musk alleged that Twitter misrepresented the number of fake and spam accounts on its platform. Twitter, on the other hand, accused Musk of trying to undo the previous deal because his personal wealth had fallen and the acquisition was more expensive.
We don’t know how Twitter will end up, but there is no doubt that Elon Musk is going to give media play as the owner of the microblogging platform and one of the main global social networks.
Elon Musk buys Twitter and already commands
To begin with, and not without first “reassuring” the advertisers who continue to be the company’s main source of financing, Elon Musk appeared yesterday at Twitter’s headquarters with a sink, announcing without saying what his first decisions would be.
Said and done: the first decision was the sudden dismissal of top executives. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, his CFO Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett are no longer part of Twitter. Normal after a months-long war in which Musk publicly tweeted poop emojis at the CEO, who replaced founder Jack Dorsey late last year. Nor was it better in private. The two exchanged battle text messages, according to chat logs revealed in the legal battle between the billionaire and the social network.
And they will not be the only layoffs, since Musk announced at the time a workforce cut of up to 5,000, 75%. In the last hours he has retracted that statement, but we will have to wait.
What will change on Twitter?
The billionaire has suggested several changes to Twitter in recent months. We like the first two: release service algorithms as open source and start a war against spam and fake accounts, the high number of which caused Musk to try to back out of the purchase.
He also announced other more controversial changes, understanding that the platform “does not comply with the principles of freedom of expression” and therefore wants to reverse the permanent ban on access to the platform of the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, issued on the understanding that his comments incited more violence in the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill, and that he was behind a coup in the main country on Earth.
On the political issue, Musk tweeted that he believed there is a danger that social media “They are divided into cameras that amplify messages from the extreme right and from the extreme left” and does not want Twitter to become a “hell where everyone can say anything with no consequences!”
However, rights groups and some Twitter employees expressed concern that content moderation would be looser under Musk’s leadership, allowing hate speech and harassment spread (further) on the platform.
the bird is freed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022
“The bird is free” Musk tweets. We’ll see where Twitter goes and where it ends up… For starters, the company will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange today to become privately owned. It is not known if Elon Musk himself, the “Twitter in Chief”will take over the executive management of Twitter or transfer it to a third party considering that he is already CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, in addition to having other positions and being on the boards of his other companies.
