Early this week, it was revealed that Elon Musk had decided to put his money where he trolls the most – Twitter. He snapped a 9.2% stake($2.9 billion) making him the largest shareholder on Twitter. For comparison, Jack Dorsey owns 2.25% of Twitter. His investment takes about 1% of his net worth.
The Tesla CEO then changed his passive investment to an active one.
Twitter then appointed Elon to its board and to tame his power, capped his stake in the company to 14.9% and his term ending in 2024. Elon will have to give up his board seat if he wants to go over this 14.9% limit.
The 50-year-old now adds Twitter to his workload as he also manages Tesla(worth $1.1 trillion), Space X(worth $100 billion), The Boring Company and Neuralink.
Twitter is a $30 billion company and Elon’s investment raised its share price and investors were happy. The social media company has been struggling to make a profit. For comparison, Facebook recently crossed the $1 trillion mark before going back to being worth $631 billion.
People are curious to see if the “Elon markets hypothesis” will work on Twitter to bring change and increase revenue and users – something the current Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal is under pressure to deliver.
Something else I’m intrigued about will be the boardroom dynamic with the new CEO and new board member. Will there be infighting that’ll distract the company’s core goals? Elon is a constant critic of some of its features – even suggesting a new social media platform.
Elon also has constant run-ins with the S.E.C. His recent investment has attracted attention as he had filed the change of investment 10 days late.
Anyway, my opinion is that he live-tweets the first board meeting
Elon is a controversial figure and him taking a position on Twitter has riled up critics.
There were internal outcries too and Twitter is scheduled to host Elon in an internal AMA session to calm anxious workers. Silicon Valley tech giants usually hold town halls but this one is going to be different as a board member will be answering the questions.
Twitter also took the stage to ride on the hype to announce they’re bringing editable tweets -something more than its 300 million users have been requesting for the 16 years the platform has been around for. The company revealed that it had been working on adding an edit button since last year.
If you posted a tweet with a typo, you had to delete that tweet or reply with a more accurate tweet.
If this feature is ever to be implemented, they will have to put rules around it as bad actors could go and edit their tweets to avoid being cancelled with “this you” tweets.
The best implementation is that users can edit their tweets but the original tweet remains up for accountability.
Twitter added that they’re testing with its Twitter Blue paid service and shared more details.
“People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment. They currently work around this by deleting and tweeting again,” said Jay Sullivan, Twitter’s Head of Consumer Product.
“Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation. Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work,” he adds.
“Therefore, it will take time and we will be actively seeking input and adversarial thinking in advance of launching Edit. We will approach this feature with care and thoughtfulness and we will share updates as we go,” he continues in his thread.
It’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out this year – especially since Elon didn’t sign an agreement that forbids Twitter board members from influencing the company’s policies. This means he might have some say in how Twitter focuses on its products and feature timeline.
The company through its spokesperson shared that just because he has a seat on the board, he won’t receive any special treatment as they[Twitter] are “committed to impartiality” in the development and enforcement of its policies and rules.
Musk will have to stick by them.
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