“The bird 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 making an attempt 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 proportion drops of their share value. Twitter’s much-criticised board has in the long run extracted what appears like a candy deal for shareholders.
Is it an excellent deal for Twitter’s 240m each 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 regulation ought to be taken down. Like most social-media platforms, Twitter at present bans some posts which might be undesirable however authorized: it not too long ago suspended Kanye West, a singer, for a string of anti-Semitic remarks, for example.
Yet 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 obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Other social-media bosses have watered down their free speech absolutism lately, 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 “everyone having a voice” banned once-permitted content material together with anti-vaccination materials, Holocaust denial and QAnon conspiracies from Facebook in 2020.
The different niggle is digital advertisements, which is at present how Twitter makes practically all its cash. Mr Musk has mentioned that he “hates advertising”. There has been hypothesis that he would possibly attempt to flip Twitter right into a subscription product as a substitute.
Making this pay could be tough. Twitter has a modest subscription choice referred to as Twitter Blue, costing $4.99 a month. But Twitter’s accounts recommend that the typical American consumer brings in over $6 a month in advert income. Would folks pay? Some would possibly, 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 also very much believe that advertisng, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you…low-relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!”
Any significant modifications will likely be made tougher by the instant have to include prices. Twitter might be overstaffed: final 12 months it had 1.5 staff for each $1m in income, in contrast with 0.6 at Meta. At the identical time, if studies are true that the corporate is shedding 75% of its workforce—both as a result of they get the boot or are repelled by Mr Musk—getting something accomplished, not to mention something huge, might show tougher.
Mr Musk might not be in it for the cash. But the personal backers he brings alongside, together with a number 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. ■