Tech

Twitter and Elon Musk: Twitter Blue, celebrities and a homeless shelter

Do you remember just two days ago we talked about misgivings about arrival on Twitter, as a shareholder and director, of Elon Musk? There were reasons to distrust, and it is that one of the specialties of the founder of Tesla and SpaceX is to have a mouth as big as a mailbox. We have already reviewed his tweets and his statements on more than one occasion, so we are not going to repeat ourselves, but surely you do not have to do too much memory to remember any of these episodes starring him.

A) Yes, his arrival on Twitter promised not to be calm or silent. Given that, for some time now, this social network has become one of its main communication tools, one could only hope that this would go further, now that it has control in place. We already had a first sample of this with the survey on the tweet editing function, which received a response from the social network itself, which confirmed that it has been working on it for quite some time, and clarified that no, Musk’s survey had absolutely nothing to do with it. Come on, what all life has been called marking the ground.

Another person, many other people, in that situation, perhaps would have thought that they had overstepped the brakes, and would have adopted a lower profile. But of course, I repeat that we are talking about Elon Musk, a person little given to discretion and, at least as it sometimes seems, to think things before saying them. Thus, it was to be expected that he would go ahead with his plans to completely change Twitter, or at least leave his imprint, written indelibly, on Twitter’s history.

Thus, in just a couple of days it has already opened several fronts, some with more sense, others with less. We review them in that order.

Twitter and Elon Musk: Twitter Blue, celebrities and a homeless shelter

Twitter Blue

The paid version of Twitter is not currently a particularly attractive option for users. We already raised it at the time, and we can repeat it now: it is a proposal that does not compensate for many users. To solve it, Elon Musk proposes several points:

  • Reduce your price to around two dollars/month.
  • Add a badge to accounts with Twitter Blue.
  • Allow payment of the fee with Dogecoin.

The first point seems quite reasonable to me, the second… well, it is true that many people like badges, so it could work. Regarding the third, we already know Musk’s relationship with this cryptocurrency, of which he considers himself little less than a founding father, and which already gave him a setback last year, coinciding with his appearance on Saturday Night Live.

Absence of celebrities

This sounds more like a tantrum than an argument, but hey, it’s Musk. The fact is that it has also been asked if Twitter is in its decline, for which it is based on the low activity of certain celebrity accounts, such as Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, who, despite having an account on the social network, rarely use it. Is the success and validity of a social network measured by the activity of the personalities that use it? I don’t think so, but who knows…

Turn San Francisco’s Twitter Headquarters into a Shelter for Immigrants

If the premise seems absurd to you (and it really is), you will be more surprised to know why he not only considers it, but has even published a survey to find out the opinion of his followers. And the key is found in the text «Turn Twitter’s headquarters in SF into a homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway«. Put another way, Musk seems to find telecommuting unfriendly, either under normal circumstances or because of COVID-19 security protocols.

I wonder what he would think, of course, if employees of Tesla, SpaceX and any other type of Musk-related space proposed to dedicate their facilities (those exclusively used by Musk) for charitable purposes, since the time spent taking rides in their jet and posting absurd tweets, make them clearly underutilized. I, to the latter, would vote yes with both hands.

With information from Yahoo! Finance (1) and Business Insider (1 and 2)

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