TechScape: 25 tweet-long takes on Twitter’s future under Elon Musk
1. OK, I was wrong: I really thought Musk was bullshitting. But he is, as tech analyst Benedict Evans puts it, “a bullshitter who delivers”. He doesn’t care if things are true when he says them, but sometimes makes them true anyway.
2. We can file “I’m going to buy Twitter for $54.20” alongside “I’ll sell a flamethrower”, “I’ll start a tunnelling business called the Boring Company”, and “I’ll call my baby X Æ A-12” as things that didn’t sound sincere but apparently were.
3. What next for Twitter, though? I think it’s still the case that the model for Musk is “billionaire buying a sports team” rather than “billionaire investing in a high-yielding asset” – but his bankers will be demanding a return.
4. That means limited scope to make fundamental changes. For all he discussed in now-deleted tweets about removing adverts and improving the subscription offering, those things cost money, and he needs to boost Twitter’s profit, not shrink it.
5. So the changes we should expect fall into two camps: minor tweaks demanded by a notorious power user – and shifts in matters of principle, which are free to make and only likely to affect the bottom line in diffuse ways.
6. On the former, Twitter has already built an edit button that it could enable at the flick of a switch. He’s also talked of “authenticating all humans”, likely by offering the “verified” label to anyone who wants to send in proof of ID.
7. As for the matters of principle, Musk has been clear: “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.”
8. There are obvious high profile changes he could order – chief among them demanding the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s account
Read more on theguardian.com
