Elon Musk surprised us all when he announced his intent to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. However, the deal isn’t final yet, leaving everything in its path in shackles and despair. While Musk refers to Twitter as the “town square” of the internet, he has openly shared his dissatisfaction with its management styles and methods.
The South-African-born, richest-man-on-Earth entrepreneur is the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company, among others. Back in the day, he also founded X.com, which is more commonly known today as PayPal.
Musk announced his aspirations for Twitter, wanting to make its algorithm and code wider open and easily accessible to the public in relation to the Frances Haugen documentation leaks merely weeks before. Several U.S. legislators proposed greater transparency around social media algorithms when responding to the document leak. However, while greater transparency may give users more control over the content they see, there are security risks and issues.
Musk simultaneously stated that he wishes to eliminate the spam and scam bots on the app. “They’re making the product much worse,” he said, instead proposing human authentication. However, this could worsen people’s expression of their opinions on Twitter, contradicting Musk’s stress on the importance of free speech on the platform, in fact elucidating that there would be censorship of any content violating the law. Since each country has a different approach to laws on free speech, it would be interesting to see how this plays out.
If this deal closes and seems to be a significant ‘if’ at the moment, it would be one of the greatest and most prominent tech company purchases by a single individual. In addition, this deal also gets a plethora of attention because it’s social media, and people are invested (literally and personally) in the app.
