Elon Musk took up Twitter – Hi-Tech – Kommersant

On Thursday, well-known entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk became the owner of the Twitter microblogging service. This event was preceded by several months of rumors, scandals and litigation. After becoming the owner of Twitter, Mr. Musk immediately fired almost the entire management of the company. How he is going to develop the service further is unclear.

Long acquisition

On October 27, billionaire Elon Musk finally became the owner of Twitter, paying $ 44 billion for it. “The bird is free,” Mr. Musk himself wrote on Twitter. According to CNBC, immediately after the completion of the transaction, he became the head of the company. And at the same time, he changed the description on his Twitter profile to Chief Twit – quite in the spirit of Elon Musk, who officially changed his position at Tesla from CEO to “techno king”.

In addition, according to media reports, Mr. Musk immediately fired at least four top managers of Twitter, including CEO Parag Agrawal, who took up this post just last year. CFO Ned Segal, director of legal and political affairs Vijaya Gadde and head of the legal department Sean Edgett also lost their jobs. As writes The Washington Postthey left Twitter headquarters as soon as Mr. Musk arrived there.

Elon Musk’s long process of acquiring Twitter began in April. Then it became known that Mr. Musk bought a certain number of shares of the service, and at the end of the month it was announced to buy the entire company for $44 billion.

Then the problems started. In May, Elon Musk said that he was not given full information about the share of bots and spam accounts on the platform, and in June he announced the termination of the deal.

Subsequently, Mr. Musk and Twitter filed lawsuits against each other. In early October – a couple of days before the first hearing – became knownthat Elon Musk decided to buy the service after all and again made an offer about it to his management. The hearings nevertheless began, but the judge gave the billionaire until October 28 to complete the deal or face trial. Mr. Musk met the deadline.

Unknown future

It is not yet clear with what funds Elon Musk will finance the deal. In April, it was reported that investment funds Silver Lake Partners, Thoma Bravo and Apollo Global could become its partners. Cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which was going to participate in financing the transaction from the very beginning, has confirmed its participation now. Who else will become a partner in the deal is unknown.

It is also not clear what steps to manage the company – other than firing top managers – Mr. Musk will take in the near future. The Washington Post wrotethat he is going to fire 75% of Twitter employees, leaving only 2 thousand people. Bloomberg later reported that Mr. Musk, at a meeting with company employees, promised that there would be no mass layoffs.

At various points, he wrote about different plans for the company: cutting costs and employees, or creating a “super app” based on Twitter with numerous functions. “Super Apps” are popular in Asia, but in the US they prefer a wide variety of different applications rather than ecosystems. And Apple and Alphabet, who control the app stores, are unlikely to allow such a “super app” to appear.

Twitter has always had and still has problems with making money and promoting ads. Compared to Facebook (owned by the recognized extremist and banned in Russia Meta) or TikTok, with its billions of users, Twitter remains rather a niche service.

Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives called the Twitter acquisition “the most overvalued tech acquisition in history,” valuing the service at $25 billion.

Complicating the situation is the fact that now most technology companies are going through hard times. Macroeconomic difficulties and high competition lead to a reduction in their advertising revenue. So Twitter may have difficulty expanding its presence in this market. Moreover, the initiatives of Mr. Musk in some way impede such development. From the very beginning, he spoke about the importance of freedom of speech for him, promised to weaken the moderation rules and cancel the indefinite blocking of accounts. So, for example, Donald Trump’s account can be unlocked.

American conservatives who criticize social media for censorship have already welcomed this approach. The EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, also reacted to the deal, though in a different way. To Mr. Musk’s tweet about the bird, he replied: “In Europe, the bird will fly according to EU rules.”

According to some experts, the ideas of Elon Musk can only increase the significant radicalization in social networks.

The lack of moderation could also hurt Twitter’s business by alienating advertisers. “It’s a throwback to the content rules of circa 2010, but it ignores the entire last decade. Ultimately, people understand that the Wild West needs a sheriff, both to keep citizens safe and to improve business prospects,” said Colin Crowell, who until 2019 was Twitter’s director of policy.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya