Just over a week before “giving serious thought” to building his own social media platform, Elon Musk went on to become the biggest Twitter shareholder through an acquisition of a 9.2% stake in the social media platform.
Following this acquisition Musk has stated he plans to answer questions some of the employees may have following this acquisition, and intends work on resolving freedom of speech problems present on the platform. Additionally on the 5th of April Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, announced that Musk has been appointed on the board of directors, and expressed his excitement to working together to improve the platform.
A frequent request from Twitter users over the years has been for an edit feature to be added to Twitter. Following the acquisition of his stake Musk launched a poll raising the question whether or not such feature such be added, following over 4.4m votes, 73.6% voted in favour. Before its conclusion Agrawal responded to the poll saying the consequences will be crucial, and to vote carefully, showing that Musk’s actions already hold some weight.
It’ll be interesting to see where this combination takes both of these parties as these are still the early stages of his involvement, and what the long term plan is for Musk following what seems to be a u-turn on his thoughts of starting his own social media platform, which the poor performance of Parler and Trump’s Truth Social may have made him reconsider. Let’s also see how this works out for Twitter in the long run, as the news increased its valuation, but as seen before with Tesla, a single Tweet from Musk can cause the market to change quickly.
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60995694
https://www.ft.com/content/9db0403f-f6d1-45dc-89a8-f80da924cbe1
