Elon Musk’s tweets have swayed markets, enraged regulators, resulted in tens of millions of dollars in fines, and even landed the world’s richest man in court. He now wishes to purchase the platform altogether.

In a letter to its chairman, Musk announced that the social media firm “needs to be transformed as a private company,” offering an unsolicited $43 billion takeover bid and saying that “changes need to be made.”

The firm did not expect the billionaire to walk away quietly after stepping forward as Twitter’s largest shareholder last week and refusing an invitation to join its board of directors. “There will be distractions ahead,” CEO Parag Agrawal forewarned employees over the weekend.

Musk’s cash bid for Twitter has raised some feathers, but his filing on Thursday didn’t say what improvements he thinks are needed, how he plans to make them, or why he thinks they’ll be impossible to accomplish while Twitter is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

However, on the company’s own platform, the billionaire has offered a number of ideas for the company. On March 25, he said, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy,” and asked users to vote on whether the service “rigorously adheres” to this value.

“The consequences of this poll will be important,”  He went on to say, “Please vote carefully.” The “no” vote received more than 70% of the two million votes cast.

What Musk’s fans didn’t realize at the time was that, according to a review of his stock market disclosures, he had already purchased over 60 million shares in Twitter for around $2.1 billion. Ten days later, his stake was revealed.

Much of Musk’s anxiety appears to stem from his dissatisfaction with Twitter’s algorithm, which determines what its 217 million daily users see in their feeds. He claims that a “de facto bias” is having a considerable impact on public dialogue, and he proposes that the algorithm be made publicly known.

According to him, Twitter is practically a digital town square where individuals speaking and listening should not face severe constraints. The argument is welcome news to some who think Twitter has been overly strict in policing users and content, particularly fans of former President Trump, who were banned from the platform last year. In recent years, the network has attempted to combat harmful content and misinformation, in response to growing concern about such concerns on social media.

Musk may be one of Twitter’s most popular users, but the impact from some of his most contentious tweets has irritated him. The US Securities and Exchange Commission ordered Musk to pay $20 million, step down as Tesla’s chairman, and receive pre-approval from lawyers for some of his statements on the site after he claimed in a tweet in 2018 that he had secured funds to take the company private.

In 2019, the millionaire was sued for calling Vernon Unsworth, a British cave diver who assisted in the rescue of 12 youngsters and their football coach in Thailand, a “pedo guy.” Unsworth sought $190 million in damages, but a jury in the United States determined that Musk had not defamed him.

Musk recently proposed that Twitter wean itself off the source of 89 percent of its revenue: advertising, as he prepared to submit his bid for the firm. In a tweet last weekend, he stated, “The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive.” This and other posts were later removed.

Instead, he advocated expanding Twitter Blue, the platform’s nascent paid-for service, by lowering the cost of a subscription and removing advertisements for those who sign up. This is one of Musk’s few concrete suggestions, and it would build on what the firm is already doing.

Twitter employees were quick to point out that they had been working on another of his proposals for months. Following Musk’s poll on whether users should be allowed to edit tweets after they’ve been posted, the business stated it had been working on such a feature “since last year” and added that its team “didn’t get the idea from a poll.”

Twitter is under siege, facing tough competition from behemoths like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as fast-growing competitors like TikTok. The company has promised to grow its primary user base by 45 percent and annual revenue by 48 percent to $7.5 billion by the end of next year.

While many on Wall Street are quick to point out the company’s myriad problems, including as poor growth and innovation, some are skeptical that Musk is the right man to turn things around.

“I think the core problem is we still don’t actually know what does Elon Musk want Twitter to do,” said Rich Greenfield, a partner at LightShed Partners, to CNBC.

“I don’t think anyone would disagree that Twitter could be better managed . . . Clearly investors have wanted Twitter to move faster, iterate faster, drive revenue faster .”

Musk’s suggestions, according to Greenfield, risk “creating chaos” on the platform by adopting an “anything goes” approach to free speech and moving the platform away from advertising, which is its primary source of revenue.

“There’s just parts of this that just don’t make sense.”

Twitter users, as well as analysts who have spent years delving into the company’s rough history, are split on Musk’s strategy for the road forward. Other corporate investors will “love” his offer, according to the billionaire. Its destiny is in the hands of the 11 members of the board he declined to join, not his 82 million Twitter followers.

Image Credit: Getty

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