I'm still expecting CNN to announce tomorrow that this was all just one giant April Fools' joke, but until that gets revealed, I guess we should continue pretending this is real.
Twitter announced today that it has accepted Elon Musk's offer to buy the company for $44 billion, which works out to $54.20 per share. Which is fundamentally funny. But how the flip did we get here?
First, I find it ridiculously ironic that founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey was fired from Twitter only a few months ago primarily because the Board deemed him unfit to run two companies at once, and now the company will be "fully owned and controlled" by a man who already oversees a small army of companies including SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, Tesla, and more. That being said, Twitter certainly seems to be Elon's new favorite toy, and I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if it dominates his calendar in the short term.
As whacky as this whole incident has been to follow, I can't help but be optimistic about Twitter's potential under Musk's leadership. It's very clear from his work at Tesla that Elon has a natural pulse for what engineering choices will and won't resonate with people. I've talked to very few people who have gone for a ride in a Tesla and did not get out of the car wanting one, and Tesla has always done a great job of continuing to release useful and popular software features for their vehicles. Twitter's raw material — its core platform — is very strong, but it has been a total innovation desert in the past decade, and it has monetized that platform so poorly that Elon Musk was still able to buy it for around 8.5% of the price of Meta. Elon can help change this.
And let's look at the changes he has already proposed. Demolishing bot accounts. Giving users visibility to the feed algorithm. Adding a freaking "Edit" button. Let's not pretend like these would not be changes welcomed by almost all users with open arms. I think the biggest flaw in Twitter's leadership over the last decade was that no one seemed to have the guts to take decisive, bold action on product strategy. Every idea blossomed into nothing more than a limited beta test, and few features made it beyond this stage. It's okay to have an extremely fine filter and only let the best ideas through, but when that filter leads to your stock flatlining over the last ten years, that filter might be causing more harm than it is helping to prevent. Musk has never been one to avoid taking decisive, bold actions on product strategy, and this will be a refreshing change for Twitter.
My major hesitation is in Musk's whole "protect free speech" justification for wanting to buy the company. Few people outside Donald Trump have been given a longer leash on Twitter than Elon Musk, so he sure doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. And all this appears to be doing is fooling far-right activists into believing Elon Musk is now suddenly "one of them." Even if Elon tries to solidify Twitter's role as a digital "town square," I think it's unclear right now whether Twitter users are primed to use this town square for discussions or for riots. One of the only issues more scary than free speech moderation is mass misinformation, and I'll be very concerned about any platform that optimizes for the former rather than the latter. We'll soon find out.
But overall I am optimistic this acquisition will be a jumpstart for Twitter to begin actually innovating in the social media space again, and if that's the case, I think Twitter users should welcome Elon in with open arms.
Just pray for Parag Agrawal.
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