In April, Musk said that he had a lot of ideas, but that he should not push too hard. I don't want it to be boring. This was a few days after he agreed to join the company's board, a few weeks before he decided to buy the company, and a few weeks before he was sued by the company for trying to change his mind. Over the course of the last several months, it is clear that Musk likes the platform, understands its appeal, and has a lot of ideas for changing it.
I don't want it to be boring.
With virtual certainty, we would be able to say that Musk will become the majority owner of the company. The "anything can happen and the most insane thing probably will" rule still applies even though it's been said that this is Musk. There is a trial scheduled for October 17th and there is plenty of time left for chaos.
Let's assume that the deal will close at some point in the future. The next question is, what will a Musk-ownedTwitter be like? In the last six months, Musk has given us some clues as to how he might push to change the platform. He pointed to where it was going. After the news of his renewed offer went public, he said he wanted to create X, the Everything App.
You should believe him as much as you would believe any other Extremely Online poster, which is to say, not much at all. Musk often says things he doesn't mean, his beliefs change over time, he might not end up owning the company, or he might just shut the whole thing down for the fun of it.
With a lot of assumptions, we think we know what will change with Musk as its owner.
Yesterday, Musk referred to X as the "everything app". It is essential to daily life in China for hundreds of millions of users to use WeChat. It is similar to a messaging app, an app store, and a web browser in that it is built into an app.
Musk said during a Q&A in June that there wasn't an equivalent in other countries. You live on the messaging service in China. We will be a great success if we can reproduce that.
It's similar to the vision that Evan Spiegel has for bothSnapchat and Facebook. It was not possible to duplicate China's success in other countries. Nobody has been able to pull off a super app.
The Signal messaging app has been on Musk's mind since the beginning of his involvement with the social networking site. The future of Twitter should involve a protocol run by a foundation, so it was separate from any business concerns, according to a text sent by Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of the company. It was similar to what Signal has done. Governments and advertisers will attempt to influence and control the surface area if you don't have it.
Musk has been thinking about how to bring some of the features of Signal into the world of social media. He was trying to figure out what to do with his followers on the social networking site. It should be end to end. It's better to have redundant with signal or integrate it.
There is one big reason why Musk is following the model. There are payments In order to make money, the app takes a cut of all the payments made in the app. In his investor presentation, Musk said that payments could be a billion dollars by the year 2028.
Musk is part of thePayPal Mafia, the early group of founders and executives that got rich afterPayPal was acquired by eBay and went on to conquer the rest of the tech industry. You can see why he would want to turn the social network into a payment processor.
Most people wouldn't think of it as a good platform for video, but Musk is trying to change that. He has talked with many of his friends and colleagues about how to make video advertising work on social media sites.
Adding a basic in-app video editor and allowing for high-quality video uploads (1080p at a minimum) would have a big impact on Musk's fans. Useful for citizen journalism It's possible that the market share lost to TikTok could be regained. Musk said that he agreed. Video is a loss for Twitter and for the people who post it.
Musk wants to make the platform more creator-friendly. The most reliable source of big audiences is the creators, and they take a cut of payments.
It is difficult to pin down Musk's take on the matter. He told employees that he wanted the app to be like TikTok, with an automatically generated feed. He told people to switch to the reverse-chronological feed because they were being manipulated by the algorithm.
The plan seems to be to give people choices. He wants to make the platform more open-sourced and allow others to create new ones. The idea is more complicated and less plausible than he makes it sound, but it seems likely that he will push for users to have more options for how their timelines work.
Musk seemed to like the idea of a future based on a ledger of transactions. He said he had an idea for a social media system that did both payments and short text messages. To register your message on the chain, you have to pay a small amount. Free speech is guaranteed.
Musk was interested in running a social network that wasn't connected to the internet. Ultimately, Musk decided that it wouldn't work. A few weeks after he sent the texts to his brother, he said that it wasn't possible with a peer to peer network.
Over the last few months, Musk has talked about the importance of paid memberships in the future of the company. He presented a plan to get 69 million Blue subscribers by the year 2025. The only way to convince users to pay up is to cut advertising to less than 50 percent of revenue.
Musk is prepared to change the features of Blue. He and Calacanis talked a lot about how bad Blue was and how they could make it better. Calacanis wrote that there were premium features and that there was zero on the social networking site. Musk probably likes the edit button, but it won't get 69 million people to pay for Blue. More may come. Users should pay if they want to be verified on the service.
Over the last few months, Musk has been making a lot of noise about the problem of fake accounts on the social networking site. There is no question that inauthentic users are a thing on the social networking site. Musk wants to make it a priority toauthenticate all humans and purge the bots from the platform. It was one of the reasons he wanted to take the company private in the first place.
How will this play out, and what will it mean for the many harmless and fun bots on the social networking site? It's hard to tell. It's much harder to distinguish between a human and a machine than it seems.
Musk began to position himself as the free-speech Savior of the platform after buying a large chunk of the stock. It was about 12 hours after Parag wrote that Musk was joining the board that he received a text from Musk. It would be great to get rid of permanent bans.
Musk wants to restore Donald Trump to the platform and also wants to reduce the amount of moderation on the platform. This is more complicated and difficult than Musk makes it seem. There are many laws. They're not the same from place to place.
Some users have taken this to mean that Musk wants to push the platform in a right-wing direction, but Musk insists he is neutral on the subject and only wants to make it the same.
This could have big implications for the upcoming elections in the years to come. It is important to remember that Musk doesn't yet own Twitter, that it is a large and complicated product that will be hard to shift in the way Musk is describing, and that Musk's plan is to mimic everyone else's plan to build the most important.
The company will have to be rebuilt by Musk. Many employees are not happy about the changes that are coming, and there is low Morale inside. Musk is not afraid to take big swings. If it looks like it will be gone for good, you can bet it won't be long.
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