By: Stephen Chen
San Francisco-----one month age today, Elon Musk became the owner of Twitter through a $44 billion deal and immediately showed his impact on this money-losing company. Twitter’s top executives were fired, its board of directors dissolved, and nearly half of the employees were laid off.
Elon Musk is planning to bring even bigger changes in the future. As part of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, he is delisting the company’s stock and taking it out of the hands of public shareholders. Twitter will go private. In addition, Twitter will soon have verification subscriptions: bringing in revenue directly from users instead of relying solely on advertisers.
Musk has previously told investors that he has big plans for Twitter. That includes building Twitter into a “super app” like those that are popular in Asia, with social media, payments and messaging all part of one service. Mr. Musk has said he will call this “everything app” X.
But Mr. Musk faces many challenges leading Twitter. These challenges are more serious than his responsibilities at Tesla, rocket-maker SpaceX and his several start-ups. Already, people are questioning Musk’s plans. Regulators in Europe immediately said they would check how he changes the service. Advertisers and misinformation researchers denounced the potential for the steep raise in toxic content and falsehoods on the platform.
According to the Washington Post, just after Musk acquired Twitter, a group of anonymous accounts emerged on the Twitter platform and began to test whether Twitter's content review policy had changed. Several non-profit organizations noticed that hate speech on Twitter has increased dramatically. Yoel Roth, Twitter's security and integrity director, also pointed out that a racist tweet was published 50000 times by 300 accounts. In its goal to promote free speech, twitter may become an even more toxic environment for many users.