Elon Musk Bought Twitter. What’s Gonna Change?

It looks like the most expensive drama of this year has finally come to an end as billionaire business magnate and investor Elon Musk has finally closed his acquisition of Twitter.

Purchase struggles and mass firings

He ended up paying 44 billion dollars to buy out each and every share of the company, which was not such a good deal considering the fact that the market cap of the shares fluctuated somewhere between 25 and 35 billion dollars during the past few months. 

Musk wasted no time and has already fired several high-profile executives at the company, having them escorted out of the building by security just seconds after the deal had been closed. He has announced “big plans” for the company, expecting to fill most critical roles with executives from Tesla, and tweeted “bird is freed” after taking ownership:

While this is an exciting new beginning for many followers of the billionaire, for Twitter’s employees the events are a little bit sad. In a Blind app’s poll, only 10% of them said that they expected to still have their jobs in 3 months’ time. 

Taking ownership of the company ends a more than 6 months long drama for Musk, who has tried to back out and get back in the deal several times. He also tried to re-negotiate the originally offered 44 billion dollars on multiple occasions. Many people even doubted whether he was serious about buying the company in the beginning, or kind of just went along with it in the end.

Dogecoin Hodlers Hope to Go to The Moon

In the meanwhile, the most famous altcoin of all time, Dogecoin (DOGE) has increased more than a 100% in value over the last 7 days since October 26 and is now trading at a price it hasn’t traded at since April this year. Dogecoin has no clear concept and has little functionality, yet its market cap was almost 100 billion dollars during its peak in May 2021. 

This was in great part due to tweets by Elon Musk, who praised the token and even promised that Tesla will be willing to accept Dogecoin as a form of payment. This actually materialized, and since January this year, you are able to pay for your Tesla in DOGE, having a clear option to do so in the official website. So now the believers of DOGE hope that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is going to revitalize the token, which was trading at around 0.07 USD until a week ago, barely 10% compared to its peak price 1.5 years back. Pure speculation has already proven to be enough to push the price of the coin to around 0.14 USD. Many fans expect Musk, also titled the “Dogefather” to integrate DOGE into Twitter in some shape, something that is not completely unimaginable and could possibly make one of the dog coins worth even more in the future.

Here’s one of Elon’s supporting tweets:

The Future of Twitter

Elon Musk is a highly controversial figure and the expectations for the future of Twitter are equally controversial. Some are expressing great satisfaction over Musk’s promises, that Twitter will become a platform for free speech, after feeling like it has been a platform heavily affected by “woke censorship” . Others, however, are perfectly fine with how content guidelines used to work and fear that the changes will give way to “hate speech” . 

Along with reworking moderation guidelines, Musk also promised to get rid of bots, which are estimated to make up as much as 5% of all active users. Musk also plans to cut 75% of Twitter’s current staff in an attempt to boost profitability and earn back on his 44 billion dollars, which he has acknowledged was a significant overpayment for the platform. 

Elon also has plans to greatly expand the functionality of the app, making Twitter in the US something like WeChat in China, which is an app widely used for numerous purposes, such as chatting, voice calls, social networking, real-life and online payments, conference calls, video game integration and so on.

However we will see what Twitter will turn into and if it will get better with Mr. Musk sitting in the boss chair. Now it’s quite complicated to give any forecasts for this social network — too many changes seem to look out of the horizon.