Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, has officially bought Twitter. What does this have in store for users?

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk became the largest shareholder of Twitter with a 9.1% ownership stake. The deal started in April and ultimately cost Musk 44 billion dollars. One of the reasons he acquired Twitter was because, according to Musk, “It’s important for the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.”

In July, Musk revealed he originally wanted to back out of the deal, claiming that Twitter had lied about the number of spambots on the platform. Twitter claimed that only 5% of their platform consisted of spambots, a result they pulled from a test of 100 accounts. This caused the validity of the test to be questionable. Even though Musk wanted to back out of the acquisition, Twitter sued and forced him to carry out the deal. The lawsuit was filed in mid-October and has since been put on hold after Musk agreed to acquire Twitter at the original price. 

One of Musk’s goals for Twitter is to make it a more profitable platform. One of the first things he did with his ownership was fire over 50% of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, whom he claimed were losing Twitter millions of dollars every day. Along with its employees, he also fired many top executives on Twitter, including Chief executive Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, whom he claimed lied to him about the number of spambots. 

Twitter users were previously required to be verified for Twitter Blue. However, Elon has made Twitter Blue a subscription service at $8.00 a month. This change was put into place after many companies stopped advertising on Twitter after his arrival, which had consisted of 90% of their past revenue. Musk had hoped this new subscription would become a way for Twitter to generate revenue, but it instead led to trolls creating fake accounts to impersonate celebrities. These impersonation accounts are on the list of things Musk plans to prevent and stop.

Elon anticipates that Twitter will reach an annual revenue of $26.4 billion and have 931 million users by 2028. However, many users have wanted Musk to step down as CEO of Twitter since the acquisition. Musk held a poll asking Twitter users if they wanted him to step down, and out of almost 18 million responses, over half wanted Elon to step down. Elon has since said that he would step down as soon as he “finds someone foolish enough to take the job!” Twitter users might very soon get their wish.

* Image from Twitter.com