Who doesn’t know Elon Musk? He is on the list of the wealthiest person on earth with the net worth over $142 billion and owns a lot of companies such as SpaceX, Tesla, Thud, and the last company he owns, Twitter. Talking about Twitter, the media has been bombed by the news of Elon Musk is about to quit from Twitter once the new replacement is found. Let’s discuss about it.
The story started on April 14, 2022 when Elon Musk decided to acquire an American company and social media, Twitter. It took him until October 27, 2022 to conclude it. Although he started buying the shares of the company in the beginning of 2022, he became the person who owns the largest share at 9.1% on April. Knowing that Elon Musk had some interest in the company, they offered him to join as one of the boards of director. It was believed that Elon accepted the offer, but after considering aspects in the agreement, he turned out into declining it. However, he made an offer to buy the whole company which was taken hard by the boards, but in the end, they decided to let him takeover the company on April 14, 2022 for the buyout offer of $44 billion. After the takeover completed, Elon Must mentioned that he has plans to introduce the world new features, make the algorithm in Twitter as open-source, deleting bots accounts and make Twitter as a free-to-speech platform.
Elon Musk’s intention to terminate the agreement grows in July after the breach of the agreement to delete bots accounts by Twitter. Elon and the company were fighting for the court after they both filed the case to the court in the Delaware Court of Chancery with the trials were scheduled in the middle of October. Before the trials began, Elon Musk decided to complete the transaction by the end of October, making him the new CEO and the owner of Twitter. This was the first time that Twitter was taken by private investment, making him taking a full control of the company.
Shortly after the takeover, Elon Musk made a drastic change in the company by firing top executives of Twitter, including the former CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal. Ever since the transition of the new CEO, changes happened also in the staff level as hundreds of employees resigned from the company after the demand of extreme hard work ultimatum given by Elon Musk himself. It is half of the total employees in the company.
It is believed that the new reign of the new CEO received mixture of comments, evenly positive and negative from account owners of the platform. The positive comment comes with Elon Musk's vision of the company, specifically mentioned the strategy to have better freedom of speech in the platform. This helps people to put away their fear of writing what they want to share in this social media without judgment from the team who are running the company. Although it provides more flexibility to the users, criticism also comes with the positive response, saying that it will create a fear of misinformation, social harassment, and hate speech from the minimum supervision of the tweets due to the looser terms of freedom of speech. From the United States of America, most positive responses come from conservatives, while liberals questioned the real intention of Elon Musk behind the takeover of Twitter, including the former Twitter who were laid-off or forced to resigned from their positions.
What happened after Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter
As per report, racial abuse drastically increasing after the announcement of the takeover. An interview with Twitter head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, resulted the data being exposed as tons of tweets which includes slurs and the other derogatory terms during the first two days after the acquisition was completed. Almost the same moment of the spike of racial abuse, incredibly high number of users flood Twitter with the prejudice comments toward Jewish people from Kanye West following his tweets for a link leading towards antisemitic movie. From his action, Kanye West had to face a temporary ban from twitter and on November 4, his tweets were deleted by Twitter as the result of violation of terms of service.
Upon the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, many big names in celebrity category left this social media platform. The names such as Sara Bareilles, Toni Braxton, Mick Foley, Whoopi Goldberg and Gigi Hadid have decided to leave Twitter since the complaint of the platform being a cesspool of hate and bigotry.
Despite the title of billionaire and his well-known skills set as an entrepreneur, Elon Musk has made the biggest yet messiest tech deal ever with Twitter. His confidence of bringing Twitter into a better platform for people to share their social life and introducing new features in it seem not fully working after all the disastrous events coming to this company that he owns. From racist and misinformation tweets to celebrities and other big names leaving the platform, it is such a big decline for a company as big as Twitter. The new features he introduced are not so much helping, plus the mixture of the reception from users all over the world about Elon Musk taking over Twitter is not the news he wants to hear. On December 12, 2022, Elon Musk made a Twitter poll regarding his role as the CEO of the platform, whether he needs to resign from the job or not. The result shows a surprise as 42.5% voted for him to stay being the CEO. However, as he confirmed that he will abide the result of the poll, the other 57.5% of the votes made him take a hard pill to swallow. He then tweeted on his account that he would quit from the job as soon as he found someone foolish enough to take control of the position, while he would just focus on running the software and server teams only. It is interesting to see whether he could revive Twitter as before or even bigger company, or he would fall with many big names ready to open their door to leave the platform.
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