Billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk’s business career has consisted of huge successes mixed with a few periods of time when the forward-thinking South African-born entrepreneur almost lost it all.
Musk is now the new owner of the social media platform Twitter.
Twitter’s board of directors approved the $44 billion transaction on Monday for $54.20 per share, and it’s expected to close this year, subject to the approval of Twitter’s shareholders and other regulatory approvals.
Elon took over a San Francisco-based company known for employing progressives and for their overt censorship of the platform’s massive number of users. Based on their moderators’ decisions, they have forced users to remove posts and even booted the former President of the United States and other conservative influencers completely off their platform.
To try to calm their nerves over Musk’s takeover of the company, the current Twitter leadership team held an all-hands on deck meeting Monday afternoon.
One question circulating around is whether Musk will manage the social media platform the way that he has reportedly managed Tesla in the past, or try to improve the platform, leaving the current work culture in place.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
Musk has already stated that he does not care about “the economics at all” in regards to buying Twitter. Instead, his focus is on “having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive,” which he said is “extremely important to the future of civilization”.
Musk’s vision of maximizing free speech on the platform may face some opposition from inside the company, which has been accused of censoring news stories and narratives that are not favorable to the political left, like the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential race.
For those considering staying on hoping to get in the way of Musk’s vision for the company, they will want to do some research first as Musk reportedly fires those who disagree with him.
Business Insider reported that a new book about Musk’s management style at Tesla highlighted that “when an employee disagreed with the CEO they were often fired.”
“For example, a paint shop manager was fired on the spot when he told Musk his production goals were not possible, and Kate Pearson, an executive in charge of delivery operations, was ousted for saying it was not feasible to hit Tesla’s delivery goal of 100,000 during the quarter,” the report said. “By 2017, Musk began flying to Tesla’s Gigafactory to frequently address issues that often led to verbal spats. Longtime Tesla employees told [the book’s author] Musk’s fury was unpredictable and often focused on public humiliation.”
In addition, Musk’s past comments about woke-ness should also worry many of Twitter’s employees.
During an interview last week with The Babylon Bee, Musk called woke-ness ‘the far-left ideology’, one of the greatest threats facing mankind. He has described it as “a prevalent mind virus, and arguably one of the biggest threats to modern civilization.”
“At its heart, woke-ness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful,” Musk added. “It basically gives mean people a reason, it gives them a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
Several minutes later, Musk was asked why woke-ness was so destructive, to which he answered, “I think we should be aiming for, like, a positive society and that it should be okay to be humorous.”
By: Eric Thompson, editor of EricThompsonShow.com. Follow me on Twitter and MagaBook
