“The chicken is freed,” tweeted Elon Musk late on October twenty seventh, after ultimately finishing his acquisition of Twitter. The world’s richest man (and third-most adopted tweeter, quick closing in on Justin Bieber) now owns arguably the world’s most influential information platform. He has already reportedly sacked Twitter’s chief govt and has modified his personal Twitter profile to “Chief Twit”.
Mr Musk spent a lot of the previous six months attempting unsuccessfully to wriggle out of the deal. In April he agreed to pay $44bn for the corporate, simply as tech shares began to slip. By July Twitter’s market worth had fallen under $25bn. Since then the local weather has solely soured. This week Alphabet, Amazon and Meta all noticed double-digit share drops of their share value. Twitter’s much-criticised board has ultimately extracted what seems to be like a candy deal for shareholders.
Is it a great deal for Twitter’s 240m day by day customers? Mr Musk has promised a extra relaxed method to content material moderation on the platform, describing himself earlier this 12 months as a “free-speech absolutist” and suggesting that solely tweets that violate the legislation needs to be taken down. Like most social-media platforms, Twitter presently bans some posts which might be undesirable however authorized: it lately suspended Kanye West, a singer, for a string of anti-Semitic remarks, as an illustration.
But Mr Musk appears to be cooling on this concept. On the day the deal was closed, he tweeted a message addressed to Twitter advertisers promising that “Twitter clearly can not change into a free-for-all hellscape, the place something may be mentioned with no penalties!” Different social-media bosses have watered down their free speech absolutism in recent times, following Donald Trump’s presidency and the covid-19 pandemic, each of which sparked on-line waves of misinformation. Mark Zuckerberg, who had beforehand defended the precept of “everybody having a voice” banned once-permitted content material together with anti-vaccination materials, Holocaust denial and QAnon conspiracies from Fb in 2020.
The opposite niggle is digital advertisements, which is presently how Twitter makes almost all its cash. Mr Musk has mentioned that he “hates promoting”. There was hypothesis that he may attempt to flip Twitter right into a subscription product as an alternative.
Making this pay can be troublesome. Twitter has a modest subscription possibility known as Twitter Blue, costing $4.99 a month. However Twitter’s accounts recommend that the typical American person brings in over $6 a month in advert income. Would folks pay? Some may, however Twitter wants loads of tweeters to maintain its content material coming. Mr Musk appears to be backpedalling right here, too. He proclaimed on October twenty seventh that “I additionally very a lot consider that advertisng, when achieved proper, can delight, entertain and inform you…low-relevancy advertisements are spam, however extremely related advertisements are literally content material!”
Any significant modifications shall be made tougher by the fast must include prices. Twitter might be overstaffed: final 12 months it had 1.5 workers for each $1m in income, in contrast with 0.6 at Meta. On the similar time, if stories are true that the corporate is dropping 75% of its workforce—both as a result of they get the boot or are repelled by Mr Musk—getting something achieved, not to mention something huge, might show tougher.
Mr Musk might not be in it for the cash. However the personal backers he brings alongside, together with a couple of fellow billionaires and a Qatari sovereign-wealth fund, in all probability fancy a return on their funding. Twitter could also be freed, however its proprietor might discover himself in a $44bn cage. ■
