Twitter users woke up April 4 and found the words “Elon” and “Elon Musk” trending on the site, not because the world’s richest , most followed businessman had caused stir with his futuristic companies, but because he’d disclosed a major stake in Twitter Inc.
Elon speaks and raises the bread. Or Tesla stock . Or the value of bitcoin . Or the doge coin one . He is probably the most influential user of Twitter in recent times, but Musk has not been satisfied with that, and has ended up buying the social network for 44,000 million dollars.
The technological acquisition has become one of the largest in recent times, but more than its economic substance, the story is striking because everything that surrounds Musk seems to turn everything he touches into gold. The problem is that Twitter’s challenge – which has never been particularly profitable – is quite different from others in which it has already achieved spectacular success.
Musk wants to change a lot of things on Twitter — hey, we’ve given him some extra ideas in case he reads us — but this isn’t a Tesla or a SpaceX with clear engineering challenges: here Elon isn’t facing nuts and malfunctioning motors for specific reasons, but to 400 million different ideologies and opinions.
The promise of making Twitter a bastion of freedom of expression is one of the most vague, and there are those who think that Musk is nothing more than the latest version of billionaire-buy-speaker-media.
Time will tell if this operation has been beneficial or not for Twitter, for Elon Musk or for the users. At the moment everything is expectation and good intentions before a Musk that triggers a new era on Twitter. One that promises headlines as juicy as the ones he has always given.