When people think of Elon Musk, they tend to associate him with his most successful companies, Tesla Motors or SpaceX. Some people might associate him with PayPal, of which he founded by merging his online banking company X.com with Peter Thiel’s software company Confinity. But now, Musk has added another title to his throne as the new owner or Twitter
Musk began to buy shares of Twitter on January 31, and on April 4, he announced that in March he had purchased $2.64 billion worth of Twitter’s shares. This purchase was equivalent to 9.1 percent of Twitter’s ownership share, which subsequently made him the company’s largest shareholder.
This led up to Musk’s buyout offer of Twitter — roughly $44 billion on April 25, which equivalates to $54.20 a share. With this offer’s acceptance, Twitter will become a private company, making Musk the sole owner.
But why buy Twitter? Musk is currently the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla with SpaceX being valued at over $100 billion and Tesla valued at over a trillion dollars. Musk is a very active Twitter user, posting several times a day.
One of the more known influences Musk has had while on Twitter, was the influence in the Crypto market. DOGE coin, a form of Crypto, has first hand experience of Musk’s Twitter influence.
The value of a DOGE coin has spiked several times after he has tweeted about it. Musk’s Tweets from February to May 2021, resulted in a massive increase in value, from being valued at less then one cent to being worth upwards of seventy cents.
Besides his influence in the Crypto market, he has been a strong supporter of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech, being known to criticize Twitter’s censoring an as well as tweet about potential plans regarding his ownership of Twitter.
One of such goals is to make Twitter politically neutral, where people from all sides and countries can share their opinions and have them respected. Another goal is changing its ad system, by potentially removing ads on Twitter as well as trying to monetize tweets by popular accounts.
Besides these, Musk has presented multiple ideas for the company even before its purchase.
One opinion people have regarding his ownership over Twitter is that he owns too much, however Musk owning Twitter may result in good things, especially with his main focus being a platform safe for all opinions and sides.
A main question with his free speech policy is unbanning accounts that have spread misinformation as well as forms of hate speech. While I’m all for free speech, a platform that everyone can use and have their opinions valued can be dangerous.
Unbanning accounts that have conducted such behavior is not a good thing, they were banned for a reason. I think his plan should be to create an environment where everyone has a fair share in the say, but have some restrictions and guidelines on what can and cannot be posted.
Along with that, I think he can bring more users to Twitter, making it a better platform. In one of his tweets, he called out the top ten most followed accounts for how little they tweet and encouraged them to tweet more.
This is a smart move, as they’re the most followed and, therefore, they would attract more attention to the platform. Overall, Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter is a hot topic, but it will be for the better, making it a more user friendly platform and making it more of a social site versus sites such as Instagram and Facebook.