Ok, I know it’s been a while – a lot has been going on, however – I knew for a fact, that you’d be thinking, hope Bal writes something about Elon buying Twitter! And yes, here it is… a quick blog post about Elon and Twitter.
For those who don’t know what Twitter is – Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read those that are publicly available.
There’s millions, if not billions of people who use Twitter. And if you’re on there and not following me… I am @balbansal
Now, to the story in hand. Elon, who we all know from SpaceX, Tesla, etc… has gone and bought it for a cool $44bn.
Elon (who is worth $273bn) said…
“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,”.
“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,” he added.
“Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
The move comes as Twitter faces growing pressure from politicians and regulators over the content that appears on its platform. It has drawn critics from left and right over its efforts to mediate misinformation on the platform.
In one of its most high-profile moves, last year it banned former US President Donald Trump, perhaps its most powerful user, citing the risk of “incitement of violence” – remember that?
At the time Mr Musk observed: “A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech.”
So there you go… Elon has bought Twitter, will enable a number of changes and as he loves ‘free speech’, it will be very interesting to see how the platform develops. Obviously he’ll be looking for a return on his investment but moreso… what is interesting is, he’d promised the World Health Organization, that if that could show a detailed plan on how to solve world hunger, he’d donate $6bn to the cause… they showed him the plan, but I’ve not heard about the $6bn being donated. Maybe he’ll tweet it soon….
So, what features do you think he should introduce first?