The history of Twitter and the Elon Musk it was a bit like an unrequited love story.
Elon Musk loves Twitter. In fact, it has a huge audience of 87 million followers. His tweets are very frequent, sometimes controversial, and sometimes destructive.
The Capital Committeemarket banned him from tweeting about Tesla's affairs after a tweet reached him to disappear $ 14 billion from the company's share price while at another time he was accused of defamation after a tweet for a cave diver whom he called "pedo guy" (the cave diver lost).
But he never moved away from his keyboard.
Twitter, on the other hand, is not transparent to Elon Musk.
One might think that offering $ 44 billion to a 16-year-old business that did not have the development of other social networks might be considered a favor, but Twitter shareholders seem willing to agree.
He wants to see Twitter growpays its "excellent potential," Musk says — and he's not even interested in making money from it. He already has money, and multi-billionaires can afford those kinds of priorities.
Twitter initially responded by playing defensively, implementing a strategy "poison pillWhich prevented anyone from owning more than 15% of the company's shares.
Why
The board may have been annoyed by Musk's statement that he wanted to see more freedom of speech and less demarcation. Many Republicans, who have long felt that Twitter's moderation policies favor left-wing freedom of speech, have been overjoyed.
However, regulators around the world are trying to crack down on social networks and force them to take more responsibility for content that they carry, imposing severe fines for non-compliance on posts that incite violence or are abusive or classified as hate speech. including.
Let's not forget the finances. Twitter's main business model is based on advertising – and Musk wants to change that. It's more interested in subscriptions, which could prove to be a double-edged sword in an environment where all major social networks are free. Twitter users may have to decide that they prefer their data not to be used for monetization and may be willing to pay for it. This is of course a huge gamble.
He also likes cryptocurrencies and could use the platform to motivate payments on volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Then there's Musk himself. He is the richest man in the world, a serial entrepreneur whose achievements include PayPal and Tesla. He's charismatic and unfiltered – something that can bring a very loose demarcation to Twitter. He likes to test the limits and break the rules.
So it did not exactly fascinate Twitter with flowers and chocolates. The acquisition was an aggressive offer by an aggressive businessman - without negotiation, and without compromise.
This is a private sale, a private company, and it is not a merger between two giants, so it is unlikely that there will be many obstacles from the legislation.
Musk's Twitter will be a very different landscape for the 300 million people who continue to use it. It could bring back Donald Trump, who for now "Enjoys" a permanent ban. This would be very convenient for the former US president as his effort for a social network, the Social Truth, seems to be faltering.
It is difficult to summarize the collective point of view of Twitter users. With one unscientific observation, for every tweet welcoming Musk, there seems to be another one threatening to leave. But when did Twitter users ever agree on something?