It's official: Elon Musk is now in charge of Twitter. This comes after six months of one of the most turbulent corporate fights in recent history.
Up until recently, Musk dealt with rockets and electric cars. Now, however, he has a very different challenge. He must figure out how to run a social media platform used by about 400 million people, including some of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has never made as much money as other major social networks. Musk, on the other hand, has some pretty big ideas about how to turn Twitter around. Here are a few major ones.
Super app X
Musk wants to integrate Twitter into "X", a super app that he plans to build in the future.
Musk recently stated that his vision for creating the X super app was inspired by WeChat, a Chinese super app that combines instant messaging, social networking, and mobile payment processing.
Support free speech on the platform
Musk's most consistent explanation for why he wants to buy Twitter is that he wants it to be a place where ideas can be shared openly and without interference. He has said that, as long as it's legal, anyone can say whatever they want on the platform.
Musk's support for free speech means that people who were banned from the platform could get their accounts re-activated. For instance, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in January 2021 following the Capitol riots, and Musk has said he would reverse that.
Get rid of bots
Musk has said that he will fix Twitter's "bots" problem, which refers to the large number of spam accounts.
Bots are a major issue on Twitter, but the company recently stated that they only account for about 5 percent of all accounts.
Musk, however, claimed that this number is significantly higher, approximately 20 percent or more. In fact, he even used this as the legal basis for initially withdrawing from the deal.
Raise revenue
Shortly after agreeing to buy Twitter earlier this year, Musk said he wanted to increase Twitter's annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028.
The revenue-raising changes he has proposed include but are not limited to: increasing the popularity of Twitter’s premium subscription service; finding new ways to make money out of tweets that contain important information; and charging a small fee for commercial and government users.
It is easy to be sceptical about these lofty plans given the history of this deal, and Musk’s erratic nature in general.
However, given how Twitter functions currently, it's easy to see that big changes are on the way for the platform.
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