Yesterday evening EU time, the news reported that many did not expect after the earlier comments from Twitter, but Elon Musk did buy it, at approximately $44 billion.... Elon Musk to Acquire Twitter
I could have offered 44 dollars for Twitter. It would have been overpaying, but sacrificing that much would have been okay to shut it down permanently.
Phew... Twitter's 330,000,000 active monthly users can draw breath again now that you're not going to throw $44 into the ring.
So one of Musk's goals with Twitter is to ensure complete freedom of speech, where no one is censored or cancelled, regardless of any sh!t they may spout. OK, we'll see how that goes. Not that I have anything against that, just that it would be interesting to see when political, medical or war info/disnfo is freely disseminated by those in positions of authority or with agendas to fulfill.
All of the controversy and jokes aside - Twitter is still a helpful tool. For instance, in my line of work, it is being used by many customers. Twitter has some glaring issues, mainly ads related attribution, which affects the profitability of the market. Twitter has some of the worst (if not the worst) attribution out there - nearly 80% of engagement is not attributed. That is insane and has heavily affected the platform's cash flow and general appeal to large advertisers since the iOS 14 / Android 12 privacy features rollout. If Musk is planning to fix that side of the business, + all of those announcements related to a more open platform can be positive.
He'll either make it incredibly successful or kill it. No business is too big to fail, especially in the social media space. Luckily, there will always be an alternative that will quickly fill any gap. Personally, I only use twitter to track news and companies I have a vested interest in. The whole twitter space beyond that has zero interest to me.
Kind of wish he would just focus on Tesla. Remember when a Tesla would self drive from NY to Cali back in 2016? Remember the Tesla Semi that was supposed to launch in 2019? Cybertruck? Space X is becoming the same thing.. supposed to have starship going to the moon next year and yet it hasn't even successfully completed an orbit of earth. Guy became the the king of false promises, And now he's buying Twitter because he's butthurt. Claims he's for freedom of speech but actively tries to silence his critics constantly. He's become a joke, it's kind of embarrassing at this point.
Any such platform is only as good or bad with what you feed it... I like getting business / stock news here, as well as decks for Hearthstone for instance. But beyond that, I don't even check it out. Because it's useless to dive into whatever bubble they create around themselves in other fields.
Elon's world changing plans for Twitter: He'll allow editing to spur even more right-wing culture drama. We live in impoverished times indeed.
I suspect it'll end in regulators/governments getting involved and Twitter will be forced to remove content which is deemed to be harmful or illegal. It could also open Twitter to legal action if they don't remove illegal/defamatory content. The right wing nutters like to think it was all a conspiracy against free speech and truth by the commies, but it was the threat of regulation, law suits and their effect on profits that forced them into censorship.
That's how freedom of speech is meant to work - you can say anything within the boundaries of the law. That's not how current cancel culture works where you silence people you don't agree with even if what they are saying is legal. It's effectively what happened in 1950's America only then it was a fear of "Reds under the bed", now we ironically have people with communist leanings trying to do exactly the same thing to those on right wing. Anyway after the 50's the whole of America rebelled against 50's cancel culture and we got the hippy movement, perhaps the same is starting to happen here and we are going to have 20 years of the musky movement!
Which law? Herein lies the problem. American free speech laws are much more permissive than the UK. Americans come to the UK to sue people for libel for that reason. Twitter might have to restrict content in certain geographies. That would destory their current product and probably be financially unsustainable.
But... but he didnt lose according to him. Marjorie Taylor Green might also get her twit acct back. Gonna be fun reading her tweets again.
