Elon Musk has just bought Twitter, even though he doesn't need it at all. AND now Twitter is internally crumbling. There is more than what meets the eye with Elon Musk buying Twitter and the max exodus from his employees. Also why are mega wealthy tech bros so obsessed with buying media channels? Let’s break it down!
This is important. The Elon buying Twitter a timeline:
April 4th, 2022: Elon Musk reveals he is Twitter’s largest shareholder, with a 9% stake in the company .
April 9th, 2022: Musk rejects his seat at the board at Twitter
April 25th, 2022: Twitter accepts Musk’s offer to buy Twitter for $54 a share
May 13th, 2022: The Twitter acquisition is still active but put on hold. This is due to Musk’s request for more information on Twitter’s fake accounts
July 8th, 2022: Musk requests to back out the deal. Due again from his claims of Twitter lying about the number of fake accounts on the platform
July 12th, 2022: Twitter sues Musk on terms he has been acting in bad faith over the bot argument. Twitter argues his conduct has wasted time in a bear market (Time is money, especially when your stock price is plummeting day by day).
July 29th, 2022: Musk sues Twitter as he states hiding information about the bots is fraud.
September 13th, 2022: Twitter shareholders accept Musk’s buy at a whopping $44 Billion
October 27th, 2022: The purchase of Twitter is complete by Musk and his Twitter bio changed to “Chief Twit”.
So there is a lot to unpack here. Of course this timeline is extremely high level. There are a ton of details around the nuances of the bot account investigation and the two lawsuits from the parties involved. But after reflecting on these events, here are the questions that keep running through my mind:
Question 1: Why are fake accounts so important to Elon Musk?
Elon Musk has claimed at least 20% of Twitter are bot accounts. Bot accounts are detrimental to the platform as these accounts can spread false and/or biased claims at a massive scale. I slight agree and disagree with this statement. I have seen both negative and positive scenarios where bot Twitter accounts are used. Of course there is a much more technical explanation to how these bot accounts work; the TLDR is: scripts are written by programmers to give these accounts directions. I am gathering Elon Musk would like to increase the integrity of the account. Honestly, he is probably cleaning up the platform for shareholder approval and cleaning up the platform for businesses to run ads again (90% of Twitter's revenue is from ad spend)
Musk has also announced his new feature for Twitter. A verification service Twitter users sign up for to verify they are a human. But wait….it’s $5 a month. Subscription models are a great way to diversify a business's revenue, so I very much empathize with this decision. But it makes me wonder about his public concerns when purchasing Twitter. Especially around if his concerns of bots were actually about the integrity of the platform. Or was it all just a marketing play for his Twitter 2.0 paid tier?
Question 2: Why was the entire deal covered via Elon & Parag Agrawal (CEO of Twitter)'s personal Twitter accounts?
This public of a conversation around something so private sparks my interest. Why were they openly tweeting about something so sensitive? Acquiring business is COMPLICATED and revealing information to the public can make things even MORE complicated. Which makes me believe these public Twitter conversations were strategically on purpose. Musk and Agrawal’s behavior reminds me a lot of the new vibe founders/entrepreneurs created thanks to the blockchain.
Open source is a new hot topic within the pioneers of Web3. “Build in public” is a term founders use to define their style of community engagement. The term simply means to build your company and sharing all of the behind the scenes. The Web3 community believes we ought to build in public. As it can create accountability, exchange of feedback and ideas, to celebrate wins and so on. Building in public also allows a company to build a following before spending money on marketing and launching. So total win-win.
I see a similarity to Musk and Agrawal's tweets and this new wave of entrepreneurship...I am also so interested in how Musk picks up on trends so fast.
Now let’s talk about this absolute mayhem happening at Twitter…
I am sure you have heard already, but Elon Musk laid off 7,500 staff members. Shortly after the company then faced a mass exodus the night of November 17th. The rest of the employees left the company together. Supposedly this walk-out started with employees banding together and mass reacting with the same emoji on Twitter’s internal Slack.
Let’s just stop right there….I have never heard of this kinda of layoff response and am appalled! I am sure it has happened in the past. Strikes are also a similar widely used strategy by employees. But me as I am writing this, at 25 years old, obsessively following tech news over the last 10 years, have never seen a mass exodus like this within a publicly-traded tech company… Definitely chat me if I am wrong.
Don't think I am not going to spill some of the gossip without some receipts.
Here is a tweet of the internal email Elon Musk sent out to Twitter’s employees on November 9th that started this uproar:
You can check out information and footage of the recent walk out. Spoiler alert: it’s spooky.
And, the best, Elon is now called Elmo by Twitter’s ex employees and users:
And there is so much more. This is such an ongoing story so Google and Twitter are your friend when seeking the latest info.
So….now what?
Chaos aside (it’s hard to put it aside I know, it feels like watching your favorite reality TV show), why DID Elon buy Twitter? It seems to me like Twitter these days is for soft core porn and blockchain hackers and that’s about it.
Well, I have a theory on why Elon Musk bought Twitter. These ultra wealthy, alien-like tech figures like Musk and Jeff Bezos are obsessed with controlling the narrative. Media communications and its affect on the public is an impactful way to sway our opinion’s, buying decisions, political views, and so on…. Hop on over to the paid side where I will breakdown the dark side: where tech money and media theory intersect.