If you take Musk at his word, profit wasn’t a motivating factor in his purchase. Twitter is one of the world’s most prominent and paradoxical social media companies: As the tech journalist Max Read writes, it’s “probably the most influential social platform on the planet - a concentrated network of elite figures in media, politics, technology, and entertainment, all of whom look toward the site as a guide to what is important in their fields.” But as a business, it’s also one of Silicon Valley’s most infamous underperformers, troubled for years by content moderation controversies and investor complaints that it doesn’t make enough money.Ĭan Musk fix what’s broken with Twitter, or will he make its problems worse? Here’s what people are saying. (It will take another three to six months for the deal to close, during which time it could still fall through.) You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.Īs with so much about the man, it was a joke until it wasn’t: On Monday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and the chief executive of Tesla, struck a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, a little less than one-sixth of his $270 billion net worth.
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