Twitter: Why Elon Musk has been so keen on taking control

Image source, Reuters

The story of Musk and his company feels a bit like a love story.

Our unlikely couple starts out with a lot of power.

Musk is a big fan of the micro-blogging site. He has 87m followers. He is prolific, sometimes controversial, and sometimes catastrophic. He was sued for defamation after he called a cave diver a "pedo guy" and the SEC banned him from using social media.

He has never left his keyboard.

It's not as effusive about Musk as it is on the other hand.

If someone offered you $44 billion for a 16-year-old business that hadn't really enjoyed the exponential growth of its rivals, you might think they were doing you a favour.

He doesn't want to make money out of it, and he wants to see it fulfill its potential. Multi-billionaires can afford to have different priorities, as he has plenty of that already.

The poison pill strategy was put in place to prevent anyone from owning more than 15% of the company's shares.

Musk said he wanted to see more free speech and less moderation. Many republicans feel that the moderation policies of the social networking site favour the freedom of speech of left-leaning viewpoints.

Regulators around the world are looking to crack down on social networks and force them to take more responsibility for the content they carry, issuing steep fines for non-compliance on material that is abusive, or is labeled as hate speech, among other things. The alarm bells start to ring.

Image source, Reuters

Let's not forget the finances. Musk wants to change the main business model of the company. He claims that he is more interested in subscriptions, which could prove to be a hard sell in an environment where all the main social networks are free-to-use. It is a gamble for users of the social network to choose not to be used to monetise them, but they are willing to pay for that.

He likes to use cripto-currencies. Could he use the platform to make payments in volatile, protected currencies?

And then there is Musk himself. He is the richest man in the world, a serialentrepreneur who has success with companies such as PayPal. He is charismatic and has a very loose canon. He likes to break rules.

He didn't want to be bound by the responsibility of being on the board.

He doesn't pay taxes because of the way his finances are structured, and he has an army of loyal fans who adore him.

How dare I suggest that he is brilliant and that we should be grateful for him, came the replies.

This has been an aggressive bid from an aggressive businessman, no negotiation, no compromise, and he has not exactly wooed Twitter with flowers and chocolates.

It is not a merger between two giants so there is not much in the way of regulatory obstacles.

The 300 million people who continue to use it would be very different if Musk were to create a new version of it. Maybe more feisty and less liberal. Donald Trump, who has a permanent ban, would probably be delighted to return, given that his own attempt at a social network, Truth Social, appears to be a flop.

It is difficult to sum up the collective view of the users. Every time Musk is welcomed, there seems to be another threatening to leave. Since when did users agree on anything?