After months of legal battle, Twitter was bought on October 28, 2022 by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.
You will have to get used to it. Twitter will now be Elon Musk, like Facebook will be Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon and the washington post Jeff Bezos. But what is striking with this takeover at 44 billion dollars is that the motivations of the owner of Tesla and SpaceX appear less linked to business than to his conception of democratic life.
Certainly, Elon Musk explains that he wants to make Twitter the ” world’s most respected advertising platform by multiplying its revenues and subscribers by four or five by 2028. At $5 billion, Twitter’s advertising revenues are now equivalent to those of Apple, a brand for which advertising is almost pocket money. The idea is therefore to go from 238 to 1 billion subscribers, some of whom will be paying, advertising should no longer represent more than half of Twitter’s income within six years.
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” Trying to help humanity »
But Elon Musk says it himself: he didn’t buy Twitter for the money. Moreover, while Google and Meta have unscrewed on the stock market this week, it will withdraw Twitter from Wall Street. What he wants, he says, is try to help humanity “that there is a” common forum ” with a ” diversity of opinions » and ideas debated without violence.
According to him, there is a grave danger of social media dividing into far-right or far-left echo chambers that generate more hate and division in our society“. A position that defends itself, which aims to escape antagonism, but an editorial position, to which the platforms have not accustomed us.
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” Chief moron »
Elon Musk goes further since he presents himself as twit chief a pun that can be translated as “chief moron“. He makes it clear that Twitter should never have excluded Donald Trump from his accounts, in the name of freedom of expression. Moreover, he says he wants to revise the rules of moderation so that we are more free in respecting the first amendment to the Constitution. It is therefore a question of reinforcing the freedom of positions without favoring tweet-clashes or the most violent remarks.
This was not enough to reassure Reporters Without Borders, which fears that the restructuring of Twitter will deprive the platform of moderators and encourage an explosion of misinformation. thewashington posthas indeed announced that Elon Musk intends to lay off three quarters of Twitter employees. Embarrassing when one claims, moreover, to highlight the local media. The billionaire has in any case shown that he would not take gloves since he has already “decapitated” the entire staff of the social network.