Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What ACTUALLY happened with Twitter.”.
What on Earth is happening with Twitter? Why is it happening and how are some people really excited, but others absolutely terrified about it, so just to make sure you’re all caught up on April 4th 2022 Elon Musk, the British fan of the world, single-handedly accumulated 9.2 percent of Twitter’s shares, making him the number One biggest solo shareholder of the company, the more shares you have, the more ownership you have a few days later. He then offered to buy the entire rest of Twitter for 54.2 dollars per share, which meant that he was offering a total of around 44 billion for the whole company. His price was reasonable, but not everyone loved the way that he did it instead of just putting in a friendly offer. He said, look if you don’t, let me buy it. Then I have no confidence in the way that this company is currently being run and I’m going to dump all of her 9.2 percent of shares that I currently own, which a lot of people have called a hostile takeover, because even without the Twitter board of directors, Agreeing with his buyout he’s not really given them a choice if Elon Musk suddenly sold all of his Twitter shares. That would massively reduce the value of each share, meaning that anyone who is at all invested in Twitter is going to lose money and so they’re all going to need that deal to go through. But then Elon did something kind of odd. He put the deal on hold because he all of a sudden felt like there were just too many fake accounts on the platform and therefore that he was overpaying. I mean we use YouTube.
We can relate to the Bots, but this very sudden 180 did raise the question of if he was trying to Trash Talk Twitter just to be able to plummet their stock price and get away with paying less either way. Twitter wasn’t happy about that. This guy was not just trying to retract his offer, but was also soiling their reputation in the process, so they sued him saying that he had to pay what he’d initially committed to and after a long drawn out back and forth, it seemed like Elon just went All right, whatever screw it, I’m in he changed his Twitter, bio to Chief twit, flew to Twitter HQ and, quite literally, let that sink in then things changed very quickly. He fired the CEO paragagawal he’s got rid of staff on a scale that we’ve never seen before.
Taking the workforce all the way from around 7500 to about 2 000 and he’s already made three enormous changes to the way the companies run, one being how he’s drilled down on the few employees who have stayed scrapping the free lunches they used to get vetoing remote Work and forcing them to come into the office even turning old conference rooms into bedrooms, because they’re being pushed to work up to 80 hours per week. Two he’s amped up Twitter’s monetization by making the Twitter blue subscription, which previously allowed you to edit tweets now twice as expensive, but justifying it by adding the additional perk of getting any paying subscriber the verified, tick, necks of their name. Oh and a sub to the channel would be beautiful, not to mention his seeming intention to turn Twitter into yet another video platform.
He started pushing for ads on videos just like YouTube and he’s even said, he’s going to offer a higher percentage cut than them to content creators, and then three is elon’s. Take on what should be and what shouldn’t be allowed on Twitter. He started reinstating accounts that were previously banned, including Donald Trump, who was taken off initially for inciting the riot of the Capitol building, and what all of this has led to is.
Frankly, chaos, big name celebrities, have publicly said they’re quitting advertisers have pulled their spending, and every day you read a new report that basically says the company is burning down from the inside out. This is fine, but is there a method to this? Madness? Does Elon actually know exactly what he’s doing? What’S the reasoning behind all of this? Well, we can start to build a picture by looking at what he said when he first made the offer. I didn’t do it because it’d be easy, I didn’t do it to make money. I did it to try and help humanity, and while it’s hard to take that completely at face value, given how he nearly backed out on the basis that he was paying too much. If all he wanted to do was to just get even richer than there were a million easier ways to do it than offering 44 billion for a company, that’s losing money almost every single year. Yeah Twitter’s financial situation is not good, but we’re getting there. Plus I mean look at the guy’s other businesses, Elon owns Tesla, that’s pushing us towards eco-friendly electric cars; SpaceX, that’s trying to make Humanity an interplanetary species and neuraling he’s finding a way for our brains to be able to direct directly communicate with machines.
Well, of course, he is making money from them. The point is: they’re all also big picture, Progressive companies that are carrying the global population into the future. So I can believe that there’s at least an element of Truth to his Noble reasons for acquiring Twitter Elon has said a few times that he sees the platform as the digital Town Square of the future.
In a world where people are meeting less and less physically. He’S saying that it’s incredibly important to still have a common place where people can come together, be able to say what they want to say and have healthy non-biased debates about important topics: okay, fine, but if his mission is so Noble and Humanity focused, why is he Firing everyone, it definitely doesn’t feel very empathetic, but you could build a pretty strong case that he’s in a situation where he kind of has to. We should be very clear about something that even before Elon Musk took over Twitter, this company was not in a good position, while Twitter is huge in terms of cultural impact. That’S only really because of the types of people that it attracts influencers politicians, world leaders.
It doesn’t actually have that many monthly active users and it’s also very poor at accurately targeting adverts at the few users that it does have. And so, given that advertising is the engine that basically allows the entire internet to run by not doing it very well, Twitter’s actually been making a loss in six of the last eight years, and so imagine this you’re an Advertiser you’re already a little hesitant about advertising On Twitter, what are you going to do if this new CEO suddenly comes in he’s not announced any clear future plan? He wants to make it a platform with far less censorship and therefore more controversy and half the things he has tried have gone really badly like how giving everyone the option to verify themselves has allowed scammers to pretend to be big companies, make false announcements and then Plummet that company’s entire stock price as an Advertiser who’s got to plan your spending months in advance, you’re not going to want to be within a mile radius of that situation, and so brands have been pulling out left right and Center. There are activist groups actively writing to companies to tell them to stop advertising on Twitter. It’S got to a stage where, as of the last announcement, the company is losing four million dollars per day, because it’s just not making enough revenue, and then it gets even worse because in order to actually pay 44 billion in upfront, cash to buy Twitter Elon also Had to personally borrow billions of dollars which need to be paid back, he’s lost no joke hundreds of billions off the value of his Tesla company in part, because it seems like less people want to be associated with his brand image now and in part from people Feeling, like he’s now going to be stretched so thin that he won’t be able to run the company properly anymore long story short.
This is a man who really needs Twitter to turn around financially and the way that he’s having to do that is to make Twitter run more like his other. More efficient companies do where you have fewer staff, less corporate structures and more just everyone doing a bit of everything and to give these employees something tangible to strive for to justify the insane hours he’s asking from them, because naturally, working for Twitter isn’t quite as inspiring As trying to land people on Mars, he’s created this idea of Twitter 2.0, this not quite yet defined concept, but that basically translates to Twitter but good all right. So what does this mean for us before we get to the bad? Let’S talk about the goods, Elon Musk seems to have no filter, and, while some of the stuff that he ends up saying because of that is definitely unsavory. It also means that you get a level of transparency that companies very rarely give.
There’S no perfectly worded corporate press releases, it’s literally just hey we’re gon na try some stupid things. Some will work, some won’t and then you actually see him. Try those stupid things realize they don’t work and then fix them, not to mention the recent Twitter files, which was Elon, basically sharing a bunch of internal Twitter documents that showed how the pre previous Twitter leadership was. Censoring stories plus he’s far more present than most CEOs actively and individually replying to customer complaints and feedback like.
How often is it that you can complain about a massive social media Corporation and then the CEO himself answers your call and then there’s also just the fact that nobody on this planet has a track record. Like Elon Musk does he’s built cars he’s landed Rockets, he’s trying to build a human brain machine interface, the point being that there’s no debating his intelligence and that providing he has positive intentions. He is one of the few people smart enough and with enough resources to actually be able to potentially turn Twitter around, but the positive intentions thing is where things start to get a little bit murky, because how much can you actually rely on that? The concept of this one guy considered by a lot of people to be a bit of a troll anyways having complete control over arguably the center of online conversation as well as your data. It raises a big question of trust in a way this guy has more power than any world leader on the planet and he’s also not afraid to use.
It he’s already made political recommendations actively telling people who they should vote for. He’S literally fired a Twitter employee for disagreeing with him in a Twitter conversation and then going as far as to announce that he was fired publicly as a tweet he’s put out. Messages like comedy is legal now, which it does give the impression that he feels like he is a lawmaker now Elon does talk a lot about free speech and I think, there’s two sides to this. On one hand, there is a reason that moderation exists.
It’S to stop those at the very extreme ends of society. The people who want to incite violence, proliferate, hate speech circulate fake news from Gaining a following to reinforce their ideas upon, and so, if what he means by free speech is just to unban people who have been banned for stuff like this, then that doesn’t feel like A solution that’s going to end well, but then, on the other hand, if you delve into it, his policy doesn’t seem to be quite as black and white. As that he’s not saying that anyone can say anything and all content will be treated equally. It’S more that, instead of banning an account when they go too far, he wants them to be able to say what they want to say, but just not push that message out in the algorithm or place adverts on it.
He wants it to always be an option to be able to look up someone’s profile and for their tweets to just exist kind of like a an internet archive of conversation. I think both sides have Merit, but the one thing that elon’s Free Speech Vision doesn’t solve is someone still has to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not, and so is that now just Elon I mean there’s a lot of stuff that he posts that some find funny. But others find really offensive as far as he’s concerned. That’S just comedy being legal now, but when comedian Kathy Griffin created an account that looked like Elon Musk, to show how they’re paid to get verified system would just lead to misinformation, which I actually think was pretty funny, he was just like nope you’re suspended.
So where that leaves me is I’m hopeful and I’m also concerned. I think the platform has the potential to succeed under Elon, but he also has so many hurdles that he’s got to climb to get there to check out my video about what you didn’t know about. Tesla and Elon: that’s here I’ll catch you there .