San Francisco- The Twitter executive board has decided to go forward with Elon Musk’s $44bn takeover of the company.
This comes as a follow-up to two weeks of his slowly buying the company’s shares, and denying the offer to join their executive board.
Musk believes he will unlock Twitter’s “tremendous potential” via big changes to the platform. Of these changes, he plans to relax content restrictions and authenticate real human accounts.
Twitter’s shareholders will be voting on the deal to see whether or not the company will go through with it or not.
Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated
Elon Musk
“I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans,” Musk told reporters during a press release on the matter.
“Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
The company has recently gone under fire for their content regulation policies lately, being called out for what many consider big-tech censorship of free speech. The largest criticisms come following the banning of former US President Donald Trump last January.
While Trump has stated he will not rejoin Twitter, Musk’s bid to buy the platform has brought excitement and praise with it. It’s been cited as a massive jump in the move towards free-speech online.
British MP Julian Knight stated on the platform recently that the takeover bid is an “extraordinary development in the world of social media”. Knight is the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Digital, Cultural, Media and Sport Committee.
“It will be interesting to see how a privately owned Twitter (run by a man who is an absolutist over free speech) will react to global moves to regulate,” Knight added.
However, one group that fears the purchase are climate scientists, including BBC environmental analyst Roger Harrabin.
Harrabin is afraid Twitter would open to advertisements and statements that go against the standard environmental consensus after Twitter banned these kinds of ads last week.
A Struggling Company
Going through with the takeover means Musk will have private ownership over the company, which will delist and go private from its shareholders. This gives him free-range over what happens on the platform.
One of the more user-oriented changes he plans to make is longer, editable posts on the site.
The company’s shares have gone up some 5% since his announcement.
While Musk claims he is not worried about the economics of his purchase, there are some issues that he may have to overcome if he is to purchase Twitter.
For one, Wall Street believes the tech-billionaire is overpaying for Twitter, with the per share price falling lower than Musk’s offer of $54.20.
Even with its cultural influence in the US, Twitter’s user growth has slowed. Their profits have fallen overtime. By the end of 2021 they had only a fraction of the statistics their much larger counter-platforms claimed, at 217 million daily users and $5 billion in revenue.
As a result, the company believes that accepting Musk’s offer is their “best path forward for [their] stockholders,” says board chair Bret Taylor.
There is current confusion in regards to who will manage the company going forwards. Current CEO and successor to Jack Dorsey Parag Agrawal told employees earlier this week at their HQ in San-Francisco that what will change moving on is unclear.
“Once the deal closes, we don’t know which direction the platform will go,” Agrawal said, according to Reuters.
There is no sign of mass-layoffs nor direct change in management yet, but this may change with time.
In his offer to the company’s board, Musk stated: “I don’t have confidence in management.”
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