The goals Musk laid out at the all-hands town meeting on June 16 were certainly ambitious.
The seemingly never-ending ups and downs of Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter added another wobble June 16.
Musk appeared via video call at a town hall with Twitter’s employees to answer questions about his plans for the future of the company.
The world’s richest man agreed to buy Twitter (TWTR) – Get Twitter Inc. Report for $44 billion in April, via what could become one of the market’s largest-ever leveraged buyouts.
It has not been a simple process.
It all started when a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed that Musk was, as of March 2022, the largest shareholder in the company.
That position was later usurped by a private equity firm, but Musk’s interest in Twitter was now openly acquisitive — and sure enough, he offered $44 billion for it in a deal that is now hugely overpriced based on both Tesla (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc. Report and Twitter’s current share prices.
At first, Twitter rejected the offer wholeheartedly and adopted a poison pill strategy in the hopes of warding off any hostile takeover.
That resistance lasted a scant week, however, with the social media platform quickly performing an about face and saying it was accepting Musk’s offer — only to be met with a game of cat-and-mouse that has continued to today.
In particular, Musk has made an issue of how many Twitter accounts are really spam bots — the company says less than 5%, Musk suspects a much higher percentage.
Now, it looks like Musk is laying down the law another way: By warning his potential Twitter employees ahead of time that the company will change significantly under his management.
Musk Wants 1 Billion Users, Hardly Any Remote Work
The goals Musk laid out at the all-hands town meeting on June 16 were certainly ambitious.
They included:
–Mushrooming Twitter’s user base from 229 million daily active users to 1 billion users;
–Banning remote work for most employees;
–Rolling out layoffs wherever he feels the company isn’t “healthy”;
–Ramping up advertising and subscription services so that Twitter actually starts making money.
He said he would also like to be sure that platform users can say anything they want, however “outrageous,” as long as it falls within the parameters of free speech laws.
“Twitter needs to allow more space for people to say whatever they want, Musk said, as long as it doesn’t violate the law,” Bloomberg reported.
Twitter Employees Need Time to Process
Musk’s list of massive changes arrived just as his relationship with Twitter’s current existing roster of employees is at its tensest.
For two months, workers at the company have fretted over everything from the tanking value of their stock options to whether or not Musk will overturn Twitter’s fully-remote work model.
But beyond those issues, there always looms the biggest question: Will Musk allow former President Donald Trump back on to Twitter?
Trump was banned from Twitter after the fatal Jan. 6 insurrection he inspired in an attempt to overturn his election loss.
With midterm elections arriving soon and a presidential election less than two years away, the use of the platform as a bully pulpit again has concerned many Twitter employees who have spent years trying to make the forum a safer place for people to post.
That has included millions of dollars spent on “health” initiatives, to make sure users who are harassed, threatened or trolled have an avenue for relief via Twitter’s own protocols.
With Trump back online, that work could eventually be unwound or even scrapped entirely.
Unfortunately for those particular teams, Musk did not address the Trump issue directly during the town hall — nor did he even say he was still interested in buying the company. He has previously said he would allow Trump back on, though Trump has claimed he wouldn’t return.
The fact that nobody asked him if he was is a good indicator that for many in attendance, it is an answer they’d rather not know right now.
“If Musk had anything new to tell the world about his plans, he didn’t choose to share it with his future employees, and rather than wooing them, he threw down a gauntlet: ‘If someone is getting useful things done, great. if not, why are they at the company?'” Axios reported.
