Elon Musk Freezes His Big Deal Over People Who Don’t Exist
Billionaire Elon Musk continues to try to deal with the actual steps of purchasing Twitter after his public offer to do so was accepted.
This article is more than 2 years old
The saga of Elon Musk buying Twitter continues. After putting together a $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform, Musk has opted to put his plans on hold pending a calculation of the number of spam accounts amongst Twitter’s users. You can see the Tweet from Musk himself below:
Note that Elon Musk does mention that the deal is temporarily on hold. Musk was very bullish about buying the social media giant before, so this seems unlikely to have a huge effect on the impending deal. Twitter’s initial estimate states that spam accounts represent less than 5% of their 229 million users. Musk wants to ensure that this estimate is accurate before moving forward.
Elon Musk made the movie to buy Twitter with several intentions in mind. According to his statements on the matter, he wants to implement measures to ensure spam bots are removed from Twitter. While spam accounts are certainly a problem, his ideas have been met with some controversy and pushback from users. He has mentioned plans to authenticate all users, which would probably be a difficult ask for many people. Since social media already reaps a ton of information, people will likely be hesitant to provide more information to prove they’re real. Additionally, Elon Musk is taking the stance that Twitter needs to be more lenient with censorship. His ideas for this reportedly include reducing the Twitter Safety team which moderates the platform. These measures have also been met with pushback.
If Elon Musk does indeed push this pending deal through, users will have to deal with the changes whether they like them or not. Of course, they can leave the platform but making changes and reducing their userbase is undoubtedly something that wouldn’t be good for Twitter as a company. In addition to losing users, it could also reduce the number of companies who want to advertise on the platform. These advertisements are a major source of income for the platform. Apparently, his plans also include restoring the account of Donald Trump to the platform. Some of his other plans for the platform include focusing on software engineering, design, infosec, and server hardware.
It remains to be seen if Elon Musk will make the radical changes he has in mind, but it wouldn’t be too surprising. Musk followed up his Tweet about the Twitter deal being on hold with another Tweet mentioning that he’s still committed to the acquisition. Twitter would add just one more massive company to Musk’s massive portfolio of business ventures. The billionaire magnate is also the founder of SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and Open AI. While a social media platform like Twitter seems like an odd addition to a portfolio of companies that are mostly focused on innovative technologies, Musk is a hard person to predict. It’s possible that Musk could also be looking to take Twitter in a similar direction as The Meta, which is more of a data collection company at this point than anything. Either way, we’re sure to find out more about this deal soon enough.
