Elon Musk — Twitter’s most “passionate believer and intense critic” — is forcing himself back onto our Twitter feeds to offer up suggested fixes for the social media site, not long after becoming a powerful decision-making voice for the company.
In a series of tweets posted on April 9 and 10, Musk shared a plethora of tweaks he’d like to see the site implement, including an automatic verification checkmark for Twitter Blue subscribers and an end to ads. “The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive,” Musk explained in the thread.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced that Musk was joining Twitter’s board of directors on April 5, not long after the billionaire purchased a 9.2 percent stake in the company and cemented himself as the company’s largest individual shareholder.
In the thread’s replies, Musk addressed a few users’ comments, acknowledging the inaccessibility of paid Twitter models and suggesting an option to pay for subscriptions with cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Musk also noted that he’d like to see differences in verification marks for average users, public figures, and official accounts.
Musk’s tweets, like most of his internet presence, seem to be a mix of genuine opinion and attention-grabbing exaggerations.
Elon Musk ‘donated’ Starlink terminals to Ukraine. U.S. taxpayers paid SpaceX millions for it.
And some of his suggested fixes were just outright jokes (we hope), with the new board member polling his followers on removing the “w” in Twitter, and gauging public opinion for turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter, “since no one shows up anyway.”
But that doesn’t mean that some of Musk’s more realistic fantasies couldn’t be implemented in the future.
As always, Twitter users entered Musk’s replies in both support and fury, the latter replying with reminders of previous COVID-19 denial tweets, his recently controversial Starlink endeavors in Ukraine, and general criticism of his billionaire existence.
Musk’s thread, and his newfound sway, leads us to ask the age-old question: What’s going on over at Twitter? Who knows.
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