Musk Twitter takeover causes quite a flutter

The maverick tech entrepreneur, owner of electric carmaker Tesla, owner of rocket launcher Space X, had walked into the Twitter office on Wednesday holding a porcelain sink. The gesture was wild and the symbolism vague. On Thursday, after taking over the microblogging system for $44 billion – forget the melodrama of wanting, not wanting, and the court case telling him he cannot back out – he dismissed the top three executives of the company, Chief Executive Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.

But there is no official announcement of this decision. All that is official is Musk has declared himself the “Chief Twit” and he has announced that the “bird is freed” referring to the bird that is the emblem of Twitter, meaning there would be no speech protocols to monitor hate messages. Musk claims that he is a free speech absolutist.

There is also no clarity as how he wants to manage Twitter. On the one hand, there is the apprehension that he plans to cut the 7,500 workforce. And he also says that he will not allow Twitter to become “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.” It looks like that Musk, the new tech tycoon, along with Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta/Facebook, is behaving as though they are in the Wild West of old, and that what say and what they do is the law.

They know that they control the new technology. But the European Union has made it clear that Twitter under Musk cannot have their way, and that they have to follow rules. In Europe, the Digital Services Act penalise companies for illegal content. “In Europe, the bird will fly by our EU rules,” tweeted EU industry chief Thierry Breton.

Not surprisingly, the social media is not doing all that well despite the market buzz and hype. It has been found that half the tweets and 90 per cent of global revenues are generated by less than 10 per cent of the users. It can be seen as good, it can be seen as a bad, business model.

The moment this thin base falters, then the whole edifice could come crashing down. Even Zuckerberg is realising that Meta is facing a financial crunch. At the end of the day, the social media platforms are sure to survive, but each will find their niche. They will not be universal behemoths they want to be. It would seem that people at large can be beguiled, but they cannot be kept under a spell for too long. That is why, perhaps, Musk is already thinking of evolving a super-App.

Musk has been behaving in quite a maverick fashion. He had tweeted that he would be selling his shares in Tesla, causing a market scare, and the Tesla share price fell precipitously. He would not want to follow the method of informing the market regulator in proper form about his intention to offload his shares.

He thinks that he can play by his rules and dump the old world formalities of doing things. It may all sound exciting to have an anarchist tycoon, but sooner or later he and others like him have to fall in line. The money they make, and the riches they own, ultimately derive from the investors at large. Of course, Musk has been multiplying the investors’ stock through his enterprises. But he does owe responsibility towards the investor. If there was no climate change crisis, then the demand for an electric car would not have been there. Musk and other business geniuses are the children of their time.