Elon Musk reached a final agreement with Twitter for the acquisition of the platform for 44 billion dollars.
Right on time and in the worst way possible. Elon Musk , after several months of uncertainty, will finally acquire the assets of Twitter and merge them with two of his companies after disbursing 44 billion dollars .
A movement that, since April, has been drowning in the throat due to a series of procedural irregularities and an alleged lack of transparency in the information that caused cries in the stability of the company.
With the tweet “the bird is freed” and the change in his profile to “Chief Twit”, Musk exhibits “white smoke” in the negotiation process, which ends just before the deadline set by Judge Kathaleen McCormick, which expires this Friday October 28 at 5pm.
the bird is freed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022
Looking for CEO
With the announcement of the agreement, several dismissals in high positions within the company were included, among which the CEO Parag Agrawal , the director of finance Ned Segal and other key positions in the leadership of Twitter stand out.
However, there is no news about a succession in these positions, while everything points to Musk being established as interim CEO while the transition occurs . All this occurs in the midst of a confusing job stability among the firm’s employees, who have doubts about their continuity within the next three months.
Parag Agrawal, former CTO of Twitter, had been appointed as the company’s new corporate leader by Jack Dorsey in November 2021, after announcing his departure from the position of CEO that he held for years.
During this period, changes in Twitter were aimed at improving the user experience, the acquisition of new services and the deployment of Twitter Blue, the premium monthly plan with access to tools in the interface.
Musk’s challenges on Twitter
This is not easy, even if you are Elon Musk. To begin with, the social network has a serious problem in content moderation, a burden that causes low rates of advertising investment and reduces income in categories that, over time, have ceased to interest users or that, outright, have been overshadowed by “less monetizable” interests.
A report pointed out the reduction of interactions from large accounts, a detail that impacts the time of permanence of users. While this is happening, pornographic content and content destined for crypto assets is growing considerably.
By failing to generate traction for “monetizable engagement,” Twitter faces another problem: inefficient account management. All the discussion leading up to the acquisition centered around the abundance of spam profiles and bots within the network. Regardless of whether they are only 5% – as Twitter maintains – or 20% – as Musk argued -, the prevalence of these accounts affects engagement and the real impact of content.
Fake account services, for years, have “made a killing” by inflating the metrics of influencers and profiles that, to give themselves credibility and reputation within Twitter, appealed to the rental of these robots. Scam sites use this resource to disguise themselves with this metric and not generate mistrust in the people with whom they interact.
This enormous amount of friction causes people to abandon Twitter and it is not profitable, if we compare this long-standing network with more dynamic services such as TikTok or Instagram. In recent years, Twitter has not found a way to manage advertising on the platform and its commercial strategy has only focused on English-speaking markets, reducing its business capacity to specific segments.
The “Super App X”
The purchase is not a whim of Musk, although the process has left that appearance. The value of Twitter is greater than it is today, but it must be correctly stimulated. That’s why this acquisition allows Elon to build a bigger concept, and that requires this tweet-based “protocol” to start designing “X.”
In interviews, Musk had signaled his interest in building a mega -environment – currently codenamed “X” – that replicates in the West what WeChat represents in Asia. The messaging app developed by Tencent brings together hundreds of services that keep the user for a long time in business, personal, educational and administrative activities within the environment.
The challenge for Musk is, without a doubt, how Big Tech calibrates these attempts. Apple and Google, owners of the most important app repositories in the world, keep at bay those applications that usually add a stock of solutions. Recently, Apple decided to reject the update of Spotify for the inclusion of audiobooks, a new business model after the rise of the podcast within the streaming platform.
For Elon Musk to develop a “Super App” that unifies multiple services and is successful in the United States and Europe, it must be on iOS and Android. At that point, the hardest nut to crack is Apple. An external path, leading X to be a webapp, removes it from any possibility of staying active on the iPhone or iPad.
So far, there are no details about the development of this app or what other environments will be part of the service.