Pro & Con of Musk’s Twitter Takeover
Investor and business magnate Elon Musk closed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter following a prolonged and controversial process. Twitter laid off 3,700 workers, and days later it asked dozens of employees, who were laid off by mistake, to return to the company. Meanwhile, the platform is a dodgy environment for advertisers.
✅ Making Twitter less dependent on ad revenue
One of Musk’s criticisms of the company is that it’s too dependent on ad revenue (90% in the second quarter) in a period when businesses are cutting back on advertising to cut costs.
Twitter has posted a fiscal loss in 8 out of 10 fiscal years, and with the acquisition, the company could be taking on more debt. The company needs to make drastic changes to survive.
❌ Free speech for all, or free speech for one?
Musk has expressed his aim to make Twitter more friendly for free speech but has yet to present a clear vision of how he plans to do that. On the one hand, he has said he wants Twitter to be a “bastion of free speech” and on the other, he has said he doesn’t want it to become a “free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.”
People play the free speech card when they want to say anything with no consequences. At the time that Musk set his sights on the Twitter takeover, he was in court with the Securities and Exchange Commission over his tweets about Tesla stock that misled investors. Musk’s tweets potentially hurt investors, and he used free speech as an argument to evade the consequences.
