Elon Musk Owns Twitter: Now What?
After months of will-he-won’t-he, the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk went through for the small price of $44 billion. The business deal was rife with issues from tweet battles to court trials, but it has finally been completed and now begins a new era for the social media platform. What will happen in this massive upheaval of such a major platform?
Musk’s takeover will take Twitter, the once public company, private, removing the volatility and accountability that comes with being a publicly owned company. Chaos has been the state of the company’s stock price leading up to this sale, with them rising to an all-time high of $66 per share, however, it has been fluctuating wildly throughout the battle waged over Twitter. Prices soared when Musk started accumulating shares, before plummeting when the deal for him to buy the company stalled and lawsuits were filed on both sides, hitting a low of $33 per share. Now, Musk will be buying 100% of Twitter shares, owning the entire company thus making it private. He will be buying them for $54.20 per share, adding up to $44 billion, most of which comes from Musk’s own accumulated wealth. The rest of the money is reputedly from Musk selling his stock in his other company, Tesla, bank loans, and investments from other business partners. Despite it being widely agreed upon that Musk was over-paying for the questionably-profitable company, he will now be forced to make it profitable to repay the billions in interest payments on his loans. Twitter becoming a private company marks a huge shift in control, while the publicly owned company was run by a board of shareholders before the sale, ownership, and control in its entirety now shift to Musk. Now, instead of nine members of a board who all had equal say in how the company operated, Musk is the sole shareholder and thus in full control of Twitter’s trajectory. With the completion of the sale of Twitter to Musk, the company is now privately owned by the tech billionaire and under his sole supervision.
There has been fairly little action since the purchase, but what has occurred has already shown what kind of an owner Musk will be. He has reportedly already fired the chief executive, Parag Agrawal along with several other higher-ups like the chief financial officer and several other executives. By removing several of the people who used to run the company, Musk has signaled that his tenure has begun, and he will be the one making the decisions. Additionally, to make the company more profitable, Musk has laid out his vision for the status of verified to change, instead of being a free service provided to certify authenticity, it will now cost a fee for users each month to keep their blue verified check mark. This marks a shift in Twitter’s profile handling and a move away from being solely ad-based in their profit mechanisms. While no other major announcements have been made yet as to how the platform will be reshaped to Musk’s image for it, the change in ownership will no doubt have a profound impact on the Twitterverse.
One shift that people are gearing up for is the lessening of restrictions on hate speech and policing of content on the social media platform. Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been a source of contention politically for many because of Musk’s well-known support of freedom of speech. Much of the inspiration behind Musk purchasing the platform seemed to be based on his desire to promote free speech and lessen censorship. This drew large-scale support from mostly right-wing actors who believed Musk purchasing Twitter would be a benefit to them, mainly through the allowance of Donald Trump to return to the platform after being banned in 2021(cite). While the ban on Trump’s Twitter account has yet to be lifted, Musk has espoused the idea that the platform should allow voices and opinions to be shared more freely. His point was shared by many on the right as Twitter has been accused of having liberal and left-winged biases (Kleinman 2022). Reports have shown in the aftermath of Musk’s deal but Twitter closing, a surge of new users appeared and increased the follower counts of far-right accounts. This was in contrast to the follower counts of many prominent left-wing voices like Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and Barack Obama who lost significant followers in the hours after the sale was finalized. People opposed to the purchase of Twitter by Musk tend to be more liberal, and the reaction of many was to leave the app for good following the change in ownership. Many liberal politicians are worried, however, that this will do more harm than good. Politicians and activists from all sides of politics utilise Twitter to share and promote views and information, and a mass exodus of liberals allows the platforms to be controlled more and more by far-right narratives.
No one knows for sure what Musk will truly do to the popular social media platform in the long term, but what everyone does know is that it will have massive real-life consequences. Musk’s purchase of Twitter changed the company from public to private, and after removing several influential employees, Musk is solely in control of the company. While he has not done much to change the make-up of the app yet, the effects can already be felt as the sale has repercussions politically and socially.
Image from Twitter.inc via Wikimedia, ©2020, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team
