Twitter has been in the news recently due to the actions of Elon Musk, the British founder of SpaceX and Tesla. On April 4, 2022, Musk became the largest solo shareholder of Twitter after accumulating 9.2% of the company’s shares. A few days later, he offered to buy the rest of the company for $54.2 per share, a total of around $44 billion. However, his offer was seen by some as a hostile takeover because he gave the Twitter board of directors little choice in the matter. If they didn’t accept his offer, Musk threatened to sell all of his shares, which would greatly reduce the value of each share and cause investors to lose money.
Twitter sued Musk, but he eventually changed his mind and decided to go through with the deal. After taking control of the company, Musk fired the CEO and significantly reduced the workforce, from around 7,500 to 2,000 employees. He also made several changes to the way the company was run, including scrapping free lunches, eliminating remote work, and forcing employees to work up to 80 hours per week. In addition, he increased Twitter’s monetization by making the Twitter Blue subscription more expensive but adding the verified tick to the names of paying subscribers.
Musk also made changes to the way Twitter functions as a platform. He implemented stricter rules against spam and bots, and increased the character limit for tweets from 280 to 10,000. Finally, he made the controversial decision to ban all political content from the platform, stating that it was causing too much division and negativity.
The changes made by Musk have been met with mixed reactions. Some are excited about the changes and believe that they will make Twitter a better platform, while others are concerned about the impact on employees and the suppression of political content. The situation has left some people excited and others terrified about what is happening with Twitter and what the future holds for the platform.
