What Elon Musk might do with Twitter if deal to buy it goes ahead
Elon Musk has performed a U-turn on his decision earlier this year to walk away from a $44bn (£38.6bn) acquisition of Twitter and is back to pondering his plans for the social media platform. Both sides are now talking about how to complete the fraught transaction, with the expectation that the Tesla CEO will complete the deal at the agreed price of $54.20 a share.
Of course, there is a chance that Musk may again try to walk away, but if he does follow through with his intentions this time, here are some clues to what he might do with his new purchase.
One of the most contentious issues around the Twitter deal, back when the world’s richest man seemed genuinely keen on buying it, was Musk’s concerns around free speech. He is a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who has raised concerns about the platform downplaying certain posts with its algorithms that curate what a user sees. In an interview before he agreed to buy the business he raised concerns about “having tweets mysteriously be promoted and demoted with no insight into what’s going on.” An open-source algorithm could address this, he suggested.
A cache of texts disclosed in a court filing last week gave further evidence of his concerns. The podcaster Joe Rogan asked the Tesla chief executive in April – when his acquisition of a stake in the company had been revealed – whether he would “liberate Twitter from the censorship happy mob”. Musk replied: “I will provide advice, which they may or may not choose to follow.”
The same cache showed Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of the media group Alex Springer, which includes Politico, urging Musk to make Twitter “censorship free” and create a “marketplace for algorithms” so that “if you’re a snowflake and don’t want
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