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Twitter: A social media site that allows users to send messages and connect to a global audience from both their cell phones and on desktops. With their 100 million daily active users, roughly 500 million tweets are sent out every day. Among many of the high-profile celebrities that regularly utilize Twitter is Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, whose personal qualms with the company have led to its purchase and usurpation on October 27th, 2022. With new ownership, what is the future of an Elon Musk Twitter?
Timeline
To understand the future of Twitter with Elon Musk, it’s important to go over its history. Here’s a deep dive into the events that have conspired over the course of this year:
April: Elon Musk shares with his followers that he has acquired more than 9% of the shares of Twitter on the open market. This came at the whopping price tag of $2.89 billion, and the announcement rises the value of Twitter’s shares by 27%. Twitter then offers Musk a seat on the board, which he holds for about 5 days before announcing his leave. His exit is met by a subsequent offer to buy the company at about $54.20/share, which amounts to just over $44 billion.
May: Musk announces that following his ownership of the company, he will reinstate former President Donald Trump as a user. Twitter shares that they’re enacting a hiring freeze in anticipation of the new leadership, and two executives leave the company. Elon Musk shortly revokes his offer for Twitter under the guise of high quantities of bot and spam accounts on the site. Twitter retaliates with a class action lawsuit against Musk for stock manipulation.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2022
July: A Delaware court decides on a trial date in October to settle the conflict between Twitter and Elon Musk.
August: Peiter Zatko, the former Head of Security at Twitter, releases a whistleblower complaint about the company, stating several security system lapses have made the site unreliable.
October: Elon Musk proposes to continue the deal to purchase Twitter, after adamantly attempting to end the arrangement. He closes just a day before the trial in Delaware is set to occur. Four top executives at Twitter are fired, including Parag Agrawal, Ned Segal, Vijaya Gadde, and Sam Edgett.
Twitter: Elon’s Version
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Since his takeover, Twitter has begun layoffs that are expected to cut about half of its employees—roughly 4,400 people. This is in an effort to create the perfect social platform with employees who are all in for his drastic plans to alter the company.
The iconic blue checkmark that Twitter users frequently look for in the search for their favorite public figures has also made a change. For $8, users could, for a short period of time, buy their own blue verified signage from Twitter. Unfortunately, this effort was squelched by the confusion that ensued, where users were unable to differentiate reputable brands and real identities from those falsified. Another issue users have with Musk’s new subscription was how the algorithm caters to those who pay while other non-blue users, that still post high-quality content, are lost in a sea of replies.
Now, however, this issue has been temporarily rectified by the implementation of a new system: one that incorporates both blue and gray check marks. Despite this fact, many figures have decided to part ways with Twitter, including Gigi Hadid, United Airlines, and Pfizer.
Elon Musk has plans underway to roll out another design to change the way that Twitter handles its verification process. The idea behind this effort is to eliminate the current hierarchy of verified and unverified accounts on the application, as well as decrease the number of ads that users see.
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Elon Musk as a Leader
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The shift of power on Twitter, though fairly unnoticeable to many of its users, is a vastly different experience for its employees. Reports say that following Musk’s ownership of the company, employees have been expected to work 12-hour days a staggering 7 days a week. With the looming threat of a reduced workforce over their heads, these expectations have been tough to manage.
Another complication for those already employed at Twitter comes in the form of location. While the company previously held a lenient work-from-anywhere policy, it seems that Elon Musk intends to change it. This is similar to his leadership at Tesla, where he demanded that employees spend 40 hours a week in the office to maintain their existing job titles.
Welcoming back Ligma & Johnson! pic.twitter.com/LEhXV95Njj
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022
Twitter’s Goals
By 2028, Musk has a long, itemized list of expectations for the Twitter company. The future of Twitter with Elon Musk is projected to have a number of changes, including but not limited to:
- An increase in revenue from $5 to $26.4 billion
- Cut advertising reliance
- Grow a cumulative $1.3 billion from shopping capabilities
- Roughly 160 million users of Twitter Blue
- Reach 931 million total users
With such lofty goals for the platform, users have begun questioning: how will Musk accomplish all of this in a mere 6 years? Rumors have sparked some speculation for the Tesla mogul to revive Vine, the once popular short video service featuring 6-second looping videos.
This would certainly spike user engagement on Twitter, bringing a younger, much-needed presence to the app. Currently, the vast majority of Twitter users are above the age of 25. Bringing back Vine, or a component of Vine, to Twitter’s sphere of influence would result in an influx of young users looking to revive what they grew up on.
If you want to learn more about the Elon Musk Twitter and his economic decisions following the takeover, click here.
Elon Musk’s X
Something unavoidable in the conversation of the future of Twitter with Elon Musk is the elusive X. One of the greatest motivators for Musk’s purchase of the social media site was the fact that Twitter would be a way of expediting his creation of X, “the everything app.”
What is an everything app? Well, Musk references the Chinese technology WeChat in the answer to this question. WeChat is an all-inclusive media app that rolls together everything from rideshare to instant messaging and mobile payment. It seems the entrepreneur seeks to either transform Twitter into this new conglomerate of media capabilities or simply use it as a jumping-off point for its creation.
Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022
Whatever it is that Elon has planned for his new and “improved” Elon Musk Twitter, it seems that little ends with the platform itself.
