But the takeover was not easy and experienced its share of controversies. Back to the big moments.
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“My daughter was killed by the Woke virus”
A position on the board that turns into a buyout
Elon Musk, after co-founding Paypal, taking over Tesla, founding SpaceX and Neuralink, became infatuated with Twitter.
He initially began by giving his opinion on the management of the company co-founded by Jack Dorsey, then invested in it. At the start of April 2022, its stake reached 9.2%. A position on the board is offered to him by the CEO, Parag Agrawal. But, very quickly, Elon Musk expressed disagreements and seemed to want more. He doesn’t want an “important” role. He wants the lead role. He rejects the offer and announces that he simply wants to buy Twitter. Amount proposed? 44 billion dollars. A crazy amount which he tried to return later, but without success. He borrowed from various banks in order to have sufficient liquidity, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays and BNP Paribas. Furthermore, some now fear not being reimbursed.
“No one wants a robot built by Elon Musk”: a historic investor withdraws from the Tesla “quagmire”
Whatever happens, all this happened in less than three weeks and the buyout is definitively settled in October 2022. The company, listed since 2013, is therefore leaving the New York Stock Exchange in October 2022. And Musk will leave as soon as his position as CEO in 2023 and will place Linda Yaccarino there. A profile with less clear-cut contours than Musk but already approached by the Trump administration and accustomed to the media and the world of advertising. And a profile that remains in the shadow of Elon Musk.
Note also that Elon Musk has surprised people more than once on Twitter. In 2018, he even “made people believe” (even if it was an April Fool’s joke) that Tesla had gone bankrupt. Some then accused him of wanting to manipulate stock prices. But that’s another story.
Has the pandemic profoundly changed Musk?
“Take the red pill“. On May 17, 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Elon Musk tweeted this message (“Take the red pill“). A reference to the film Matrixwhen the hero joins the resistance. A turning point. Like many, Elon Musk may have ultimately followed a classic path of “resistance” in the face of various government measures and adopted more “shock” positions. Moreover, he who supported Joe Biden in the past has subsequently become closer to Donald Trump since then and has clearly made a very right turn. Her conflict with her transgender daughter Vivian (born Xavier in 2004) will also make Elon Musk say in July 2024 that she was “killed by the Woke virus“. And will further strengthen it in this turn. A useful context to understand the sequence of events.
Controversies scare away advertisers
By landing at the head of Twitter, Elon Musk begins to significantly slash the workforce. Self-proclaimed defender of freedom of expression, he targets in particular the “moderation” branch, which he reduces almost to nothing, and wants to distance himself from “sold” and “censorious” Big Techs, like Google or Facebook.
But by reducing moderation to a trickle, it offered a huge sounding board to more extreme users. Algorithms boost the visibility of racist, supremacist, populist and hateful content. Bottom line: major advertisers are stopping or significantly reducing their advertising campaigns on the platform. Like Disney, Coca-Cola, Google, General Motors, Volkswagen, Pfizer, Mondelez. It’s a massacre. Advertising revenue – the primary source of income – will drop by nearly $2 billion in 2023, whereas it represented nearly $4.5 billion in revenue before the recovery. And the implementation of paid subscriptions and “Twitter Blue”, which allows you to pay to “certify” your account, will not be enough to redress the situation.
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“Twitter is an arena, if you decide to enter it, you have to fight.”
Elon Musk then accuses these large groups of wanting to kill X and directly insults Bob Iger, the boss of Disney. But during this bloodletting, Elon Musk also strengthens himself among circles proclaiming themselves defenders of freedom of expression and against right-thinking, and attracts the favors of smaller players. Note that Apple has never stopped its campaigns on the platform.
User decline
Note also that a tendency to leave the network has begun in certain circles. The number of active users of , according to Statista. Which reinforces Musk in the spiral of “always more controversy”, in order to maintain a very “viral” audience. He who, before the takeover, said: “Twitter is an arena, if we decide to get into it, we have to fight”.
And while he continues to denounce search bias on Google and others which, according to him, favor search results on Kamala Harris to the detriment of Donald Trump, he does not hesitate to use the Republican candidate, who had also been banned from the platform before Musk restored access to him.
