Elon Musk’s offensive paid off. For a week that the billionaire has been working to raise the necessary funds, Twitter had never been so close to falling into the hands of the businessman. On Monday April 27, the board of directors of the platform reached an agreement with the boss of Tesla on an offer of 44 billion dollars. Despite the initial reluctance of its president, Bret Taylor, the board of Twitter sided with the arguments of the billionaire, who gets away with a new company and, soon, a social network in his name.
It’s not all over yet. It remains to convince the shareholders to sell their shares to Elon Musk. A vote is expected to take place in the coming weeks. The regulatory authorities will then have to approve the operation, which however has little chance of being revoked – Elon Musk is not buying a competitor, but a listed company, recalls the New York Times. A process that could take between 4 and 6 months, specified in front of the employees of the company Parag Agrawal, the current director of Twitter, who should remain in post until the end of the deal.
Worried employees
Employees may be reimbursed the price of their shares in the company in cash. And then… Elon Musk will become their boss. The platform, which employs more than 7,000 people in 35 offices around the world, had not experienced such upheaval since the departure of its founder, Jack Dorsey, last November. What awaits the social network is not yet clear. Elon Musk only expressed a few vague ideas on how he intends to improve the platform, such as introducing a button to be able to edit his tweets, or increasing the price of the Premium offer for his subscribers.
Nothing shocking so far. Twitter’s economic model should not undergo major changes in the short term, assured Parag Agrawal. “We will spend time with Elon to find out more. And when we know more, we will share his feedback with you,” he told his employees on Monday, according to testimonies collected by the washington post. For two years, the platform has beefed up its advertising revenue, reaching $5 billion in revenue in 2021. In this context, the company’s results in the first quarter of 2022 will only be more than expected. The exercise should be presented on Thursday, when the company will also have to specify its roadmap for the coming months.
« Freedom of expression » according to Elon Musk
By sacrificing 21 billion dollars from his pocket (almost 7% of his personal fortune) in this operation, Elon Musk offers himself considerable leverage. A privilege that few billionaires, with the exception of Mark Zuckerberg, can claim today. Twitter has 217 million subscribers, far less than Facebook or Instagram. But its audience allows it to reach an influential public in opinion, such as politicians and journalists. According to several works, the latter would be nearly 75% to maintain an account on the platform.
Will the future owner be able to do what he wants with Twitter? In a personal crusade against the « censorship » practiced by the platform, Elon Musk considers Twitter as a citadel besieged by the « woke » culture – a term used by the American right to denounce sometimes the discourse on gender, sometimes on racial identity. . Remarks about trans people, dubious jokes about Bill Gates’ overweight, manipulation of Tesla’s price… For years, the billionaire has been giving himself heart joy on the platform, sometimes flirting with the red lines. Going so far as to make his own photomontages to ridicule his adversaries.
But the libertarian is not short of a contradiction. He knows how to be touchy, for example, when this little game turns against him. Last January, Elon Musk offered $ 5,000 to a teenager to stop tracking the movement of his private jets around the world, says the magazine Futuristic. The richest man in the world did not appreciate being tracked by a young man barely fifteen years old, whose account he ended up blocking, for lack of being able to have it deleted. Freedom of speech »? The value can, therefore, have variable geometry when it comes to protecting the “personal security” of the billionaire.
Fight against « bots »
The social network, which is already struggling with great difficulty against online hatred, cannot overcome the limits set by the law. Several countries, including Europe with the Digital Services Act (DSA), have planned to impose heavier penalties for excesses on the platform. In the next few years, Twitter could be brought to shed full light on its moderation rules. A point on which the platform has always maintained a certain opacity, refusing to publish figures on the number of employees assigned to this activity.
In response to these concerns, Elon Musk wants to bring more transparency. He announced that he wanted to make the « source code » of the application public for all developers. In addition, he says he wants to hunt down fake accounts by all means and crack down on « bots ». These automatic accounts that swarm on the platform and spread disinformation under anonymous profiles. These commitments are not new, but neither are they untenable goals. LWhen he gets tired of battling robots, will Elon Musk set Twitter free? Only Twitter shareholders have the answer, right now, until the next episode.
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