Twitter Takeover Saga

Hadam Che | December 12, 2022

Illustration courtesy: Yeseong Park

Is it the end of an era for Elon Musk? Throughout the last two decades, Musk has built a kingdom around his numerous projects and online presence. He is the co-founder of Paypal, the most prominent online payment platform today, and the face of two massive corporations, Tesla and SpaceX. His ability to innovate and his eccentric personality attracted followers both on and offline, many to point of worship.

However, his status seems to be in peril in 2022, as Musk faces controversies regarding his personal life and struggling business ventures—as seen in his takeover of Twitter.

Musk’s long, tumultuous relationship with the social media platform began in January when he started purchasing shares. He fist proposed to buy Twitter for $44 billion in April and undertook an operations to acquire financial backing (Reuters). It is estimated that he sold several billions of dollars of Tesla shares in the process (Reuters). He revoked his promise to purchase the platform in May, given the possibility that Twitter inaccurately reported on the number of bots and fake accounts. However, in August, Musk overturned his statement once again and decided to go through with the original deal of $44 billion (NYT).

Major reforms have happened to Twitter since the new CEO notoriously entered its headquarters with a sink in his arms (NYT). Musk laid off approximately half of the employees, most on extremely short notice-prompting them to file lawsuits against him. The company has been made private after Musk fired Twitter board members. The content moderation team, originally composed of hundreds of people, was reduced to a mere 15 employees, throwing the platform environment into chaos. Controversial figures such as Kanye West and Donald Trump have been allowed back on the platform under Musk’s revised censorship system. Consequently, instances of hate speech have tripled, according to reports (NYT).

The Twitter owner’s comportment raised questions as well. Musk damaged his reputation with allegations of sexual harassment and the revelation of his secret children with a workplace subordinate, and many have grown apathetic of Musk’s on-and-off business deals with Twitter (Observer).

Evidently, his business and personal image crisis has taken a toll on not only Twitter but also his pre-existing companies. Research led by Civic Science shows that the public perception of Musk has plummeted, with 54% of consumers viewing him unfavorably (Observer). Experts predict that this will have a negative impact on Tesla sales as well, with buyers second-guessing their purchases in light of the CEO’s declining reputation.