It is hard to imagine investing $500 million in someone's vision for a company only to see him try to distance himself from it. Changpeng is known as "CZ".
Zhao told an audience tonight at Web Summit in Lisbon that he wasn’t bothered when, after committing to invest $500 million in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Musk then tried for months to torpedo the deal.
"When we invest in a deal, we're very comfortable if the deal goes through." If the deal doesn't happen, we're very comfortable. We want to get to a point where we are in this situation.
He admitted that he was a little bit surprised when the deal went through, but he got on board again as an investor and active user.
He said that the freedom of money is inextricably tied to the freedom of speech.
As a founder who finds himself in the headlines and doesn't always like what he reads, free speech is important to him. Zhao, whose personal fortune is estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, has his followers. The news can be corrected. He said no when asked if he thought the social network was restricted on this front.
He said that he is an active user of the app more than he is of the app. I don't buy or sell anything. I store my digital currency on a website, and then I use a messaging service to communicate with people in the community.
Musk is the biggest driver because he loves to support his "different ideas."
Despite forking over a huge check to Musk, Zhao insisted that he doesn't receive much detail about what's happening inside the company right now, and that he heard of Musk's plan to charge verified users $8 per month at the same time as the rest of the company.
He said that they are very supportive of anything that can reduce the number of people on the social networking site. Musk doesn't deliberate for long, that's what he appreciated the most. The speed of change is much quicker now. I didn't see a lot of new features last year. The speed of new features will be much quicker with the new leader in charge.
Zhao said that not all of them will stay. He said most of them will not stick. It is possible to figure out the rest of the features by defining a lot of new features.
Musk demurred when he would expect a return on his investment. We expect to be involved in the next 50 to 100 years. We don't care if it's short term or long term. We care about the long term potential of the platform. They have a lot of potential, but they also have a lot of potential together. We are very confident that this will be a much stronger platform in a couple of decades.
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