Written by: Ewan Strydom
The last time I had a chat with Theunis Janse van Rensburg about Elon Musk and his twitter adventures, he just bought around nine percent of Twitter, making him the biggest shareholder.
But, as we know Elon, he always has some wacky plan up his sleeve. After he became the biggest shareholder, there was a lot of speculation whether or not he would take a seat on the board. As it turns out, accepting a seat on the board would prohibit him from actually buying Twitter. Naturally, Elon Musk declined… and this is where his “whacky” plan started to see daylight.
Anyhow, that’s the short version of the recent Twitter adventures of Elon Musk.
We know now that he went on a bought the social media platform for a cool $44 Billion dollars, more than Austin Powers Dr. Evil could ever wrap his head around for some take over the world scheme.
The question though now is…what is Elon going to do with Twitter.
Firstly, one of the biggest things is that Twitter is no longer a public company, Elon decided it’s better to go private with this social media beast.
There is still a lot in the air as to what is really going to change, but what we do know is that Elon Musk has got very big ambitions for Twitter, just like he has with all of his other companies.
He has plans to really address what the public has been asking for. Things like stopping certain kinds of political advertising on he platform, which proved to cause some real havoc in the past. He is looking at banning things like ‘deepfakes‘ to curb the spread of misinformation.
That being said, he still wants to keep an open platform and focus on freedom of speech, and with freedom of speech, misinformation can still be present. What he will focus on, what we heard, he will change the way Twitter ‘labels’ misinformation. There will still be a little ‘warning’ on the tweet, but he wants to put more responsibility on the user to find out if what he/she read, is legit.
With regards to the algorithm that serves up the content on your feed, currently, it is very convoluted, what Elon is aiming to to is to make that algorithm open source where developers can tap into it, obviously in a controlled space, but he would like to make it more natural. All very technical I know.
He wants to make it more about the user experience in the end, less complicated and more enjoyment I suppose.
Ultimately, he wants to make money, as any private business wants. Elon said that he is looking to quadruple the number of active Twitter users by 2028, which translates to about a 400% growth.
Talk about a monumental goal!
But like all things Elon, we will have to wait and see…
Listen to my Chat with Theunis of Bandwidth Blog HERE
