Twitter informed the US securities regulator SEC on Friday about the delisting, thereby confirming the completion of the takeover.
Executive immediately fired
According to consistent US media reports, Musk fired senior executives on Thursday, including former CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal. Allegedly, Musk initially wanted to take over the top post himself. Only over time could he give the job to someone else, it was said. Musk tweeted that night, referring to the company’s logo, “The bird is freed.” He already leads the electric car manufacturer Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX.
According to the star entrepreneur, buying Twitter is about strengthening freedom of speech. However, critics fear that the tone on the Internet platform will be brutalized and are concerned that the change of ownership will lead to more unbridled hate messages, hate speech and disinformation. The federal government said on Friday that it wanted to monitor developments on Twitter “very closely” after Musk’s takeover. EU Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton warned Musk in a tweet against making the short message service an unregulated platform: “In Europe, the bird will fly according to our EU rules”.
OÖN editor Martin Roithner classifies the developments:
Too lax moderation of content could also scare off advertising partners, putting Twitter’s main source of income at risk. Against this background, Musk wrote an open letter to the company’s advertising customers on Thursday. Twitter should not become a “place of horror” where anything can be said without consequences, he explained. The platform must be “warm and inviting for everyone”. Musk continued that he didn’t buy Twitter because it would be easy or to make more money. “I did it to help humanity I love.”
Musk was still trying to call off the purchase
Musk had actually agreed on the takeover with Twitter in April. In July, however, he declared the agreement invalid because of alleged misrepresentations about fake accounts. Twitter then sued for compliance with the purchase agreement. At the beginning of October, the boss of the US electric car manufacturer Tesla surprisingly renewed his purchase offer, which led to the court proceedings being suspended. However, the responsible judge had given the parties to the dispute a deadline to conclude the deal by October 28th.
Musk had been trying to call off the expensive takeover for months. However, after it became increasingly clear that his chances in the court process were rather poor, he gave up his resistance. As a result, the troubled company is now in the possession of a man of all people who has been publicly criticizing the company management for the past few months and has spread doubts about the value of the company. It has been clear over the past few days that Musk has come to terms with his new role as Twitter owner.
Musk now referred to himself as “Chief Twit”
Musk showed up at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday and now calls himself “Chief Twit” on his Twitter profile. According to the US media, he wants to introduce himself to the employees there this Friday. That shouldn’t be an easy performance, after recent reports of large job cuts caused uncertainty among employees. However, he is said to have rejected information that he wanted to throw out three quarters of the employees at headquarters this week.
Musk wants to allow Trump to tweet again
The fact that the richest person in the world, according to billionaire rankings such as the “Forbes” list, is now pulling the strings in the online network is also politically explosive. Musk has already spoken out in favor of reinstating former US President Donald Trump on the platform. In May, Musk called Trump’s ban from Twitter in the wake of his expressions of sympathy for supporters who stormed the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021 “morally wrong and just plain stupid”. A return to the influential network would come just in time for Trump to run for the 2024 presidential election.
Trump’s reaction to the completion of Musk’s takeover was not long in coming. “I’m so glad Twitter is in sane hands now and is no longer being run by left-wing crackpots and lunatics who really hate our country,” he wrote on Friday on Truth Social, a social media platform he co-founded. Twitter must now work hard to rid itself of all the bots and fake accounts that have damaged the online service. “It will be much smaller, but better,” said the former US President.
Musk recently showed political solidarity with the Republican Party, which is still dominated by Trump. US President Joe Biden’s Democrats have become a “party of division and hatred,” he wrote on Twitter in May. Musk received applause for this from right-wing Congressman Lauren Boebert – a Trump supporter and advocate of relaxed gun laws who stands up against corona measures, abortion, gay marriage and renewable energy.
In addition, Musk received criticism for two foreign policy advances. He suggested making Taiwan a “special administrative region” under Chinese rule. The government in Taipei rejected this as “unacceptable”. Musk also called for Ukraine to give up Russia’s illegally annexed Crimea and agree to a UN-supervised referendum in its Russian-held territories.
Then there was the Kanye West thing. When the rapper was banned from Instagram in October for an anti-Semitic post, he posted on Twitter for the first time in almost two years. “Welcome back to Twitter my friend,” Musk tweeted. Just a day later, West was also banned from Twitter for an anti-Semitic statement. Musk wrote afterwards that he spoke to West “and expressed my concern about his recent tweet – which I think he took to heart”. A few hours after the takeover was completed, West’s account was back online, albeit without the most offensive tweet. How he describes Zuckerberg as his “N…” when complaining about the Instagram ban can be read further.
Meanwhile, Twitter has been struggling commercially for a long time. In view of inflation and economic risks, advertisers are holding back on the online advertising market, which is by far the most important source of income for the internet platform. Twitter has not yet presented figures for the past third quarter. However, in the previous quarter, sales declined slightly and it incurred a loss of $270 million. After all, the number of daily active users rose from 229 million to 237.8 million.
One can currently only speculate as to how exactly the service will change under the direction of the tech billionaire. In the past few months, Musk has announced that he will ensure more freedom of expression on Twitter, fight fake accounts and automated posting bots, expand the service into an all-purpose app similar to WeChat in China, and the permanently banned US President Donald Trump back onto the platform. The latter is easy – not much is known about how Musk intends to reach the rest.
In addition, through sales of shares in electric car maker Tesla, loans and investor money, Musk scraped together around $44 billion for a company that made $1.47 billion in profits in its best year and was mostly in the red. So the conversion should also boost business so that the money doesn’t go to waste.
Twitter changed the world with a simple concept: anyone can type a short message, it can reach anyone in the world. The ditching of a passenger jet in New York’s Hudson River, the first indications of the US action against terrorist leader Osama bin Laden – it was first found out via Twitter.
But Twitter never managed to convert this weight in the world into lucrative business. And unlike Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, the founders didn’t secure shares with more voting rights that would cement their control. Thus, the online platform with global influence became a relatively easy takeover target. Recently, the activity of many celebrity accounts has also decreased noticeably. “Is Twitter dying?” Musk asked in the spring – a few days before he made the purchase offer.
Since Tesla has a large plant in Shanghai, which is very important for the company, there have been public concerns that Musk could, for example, restrict freedom of expression around China on Twitter in order to get on well with the leadership in Beijing .
The turbulent life of Twitter buyer, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk (50) in pictures:
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