After an interminable game of will-he, wont-he, Elon Musk now actually, officially owns Twitter . And on the order of the Delaware Court of Chancery, there are no take-backs .
Musks ill-advised $44 billion, $54.20 per share offer significantly overvalued the company, which traded as low as $32.65 per share in July. Thats thanks in part to his own vocal criticism of the company he now owns.
Despite his best efforts to exit the deal at one point tweeting a poop emoji at Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal Musk now has to actually manage the company.
Its like the figurative the dog that caught the car now that he owns Twitter, William Klepper, an expert on corporate governance and a professor at Columbia Business School, previously told HuffPost. Hell have to provide the executive leadership needed to maintain and grow the company. He cant just hold it in his portfolio!
Musk immediately fired four top executives , including CEO Parag Agrawal, and appointed himself the new Chief Twit.
Despite the purge, there remain significantly more unknowns about Musks plans for the influential platform, and the worlds richest person has a history of grand visions that can be slow to materialize (or dont pan out).
Heres what may change in the Musk era at the bird app so many of us love to hate.
Embracing Malcontent
Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, has publicly indicated hell permit more controversial posts on the platform. But outside of tweeting broad aphorisms, hes been light on specifics.
Things could get tricky for Musk, whose wealth rises and falls with the value of Tesla, a brand thats tightly linked to his public persona and could bear the brunt of shifting consumer sentiment if, say, Musk opens the floodgates to a bunch of white supremacists on Twitter.
The Tesla influence has a worrying geopolitical flip side. What happens, for instance, if Russia asks Musk to silence Twitter dissent there, in exchange for access to its rare earth reserves , which Tesla needs for battery production?
Evan Greer, deputy director at Fight for the Future, a digital rights nonprofit, had a similar concern.
Content moderation decisions on platforms as consequential as Twitter should be made carefully and through a human rights framework, Greer said in an earlier emailed statement. Now, there is a single human with the power to make changes to Twitters speech policies. Thats not a boon for free expression, it makes a mockery of it.
It was a problem when Twitter answered to Wall Street, they continued. But its certainly not better if its run by one billionaire.
Un-Banning The Banned
After years of using Twitter to spread aggressive and violent rhetoric, the company permanently banned Donald Trump on Jan. 8, 2021, days after the then-president used the platform to incite a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.
Musk wants to rescind Trumps ban in particular and the policy of permanent bans in general.
The entrepreneur told the Financial Times in May that he believes perma-bans fracture dialogue and undermine trust in the platform while doing nothing to encourage civility. Permanent bans, he said, should be reserved only for bots and spam accounts.
That doesnt mean that somebody gets to say whatever they want to say, Musk said. If they say something that is illegal or otherwise just destructive to the world, then perhaps there should be a timeout, a temporary suspension, or that particular tweet should be made invisible or have very limited traction.
But I think perma-bans just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter as a town square where everyone can voice their opinion, he added.
I think [perma-banning Trump] was a morally bad decision, to be clear. And foolish in the extreme.
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