To The Moon

With Elon Musk tussle with the Board to take Twitter $Twitter(TWTR)$ private turning into more like a soap opera, Twitter-verse and Internet have been abuzz with what changes to the service are in store, if he were to succeed in his bid. Musk recent tweets might offer clues of five fundamental changes that might occur!

Screenshots from the horse's mouth: Musk's Twitter account are provided for background and context.

(1) Zero the Board

The first one is now widely known, he would cut the Board salary to $0, saving 3 mil per year off the bat, as other than co-founder Jack Dorsey, their collective paltry ownership of just 77 shares (vs Musk's 73.49 million) of the company is taken as a serious lack of stake in working for Twitter shareholders. It might make the current members’ position untenable, and they either resign or be replaced, presumably by members with higher holdings in the company, who would fight for their own and shareholders’ interests.

(2) Add the Edit Button

With legions of users including Musk clamouring for this function, and reportedly Twitter also studying how to implement it, the ability to edit, or at the very least, fix spelling, grammatical or links errors immediately after posting might soon be a reality. From a poll of 4.4millon followers, 73.6% voted to have an edit button.

(3) Kill the Bots

Spam bots and fake accounts have been impersonating Elon Musk and other celebrities to promote crypto-scams and other fakeries, and it seems Twitter could not root out this completely. Twitter even supported some machine learning chat-bots for answering user queries and giving helpful information. Musk would likely declare 'war' to eradicate them completely, leaving only verified humans to tweet, if he were to take over Twitter.

(4) Open the Algorithms

Twitter algorithms which include trending #hashtags, suggesting tweets or people to follow, latest events and topics relevant to one's activities are not shared publicly. How it actually determines if tweets are flagged for breaking community rules are also rather opaque, or some say erratic. Musk is worried that there might be bias towards certain views considered politically correct, while others are not tolerated. Thus, he would likely want to make these algorithms more transparent by having open-source codes that can be scrutinised and improved by anyone, if he were to honour what 82.7% of his 1.1 mil followers polled wanted.

(5) Free Up the Speech

This is probably the most challenging change to make, in part because Musk experienced this first hand, when the SEC and judge decided that his 2018 tweets on “taking Tesla private” was an attempt to defraud investors. He claimed he should be free to express his views. In recent tweets, he advocated that in the ongoing geopolitical conflict, even though many condemn Russia’s actions, both sides viewpoints should not be blocked through his Starlink satellite services.

A poll that he asked his followers to vote on carefully showed 70.4% of them did not think Twitter is rigorously upholding the principles of free speech. If this is the case, he would likely loosen the moderation of what is considered acceptable and not acceptable news and viewpoints on Twitter.

Musk has recently moderated his stance of being a “free speech absolutist” with his Apr 20 tweet. He thinks that other than the extreme 10% of the leftist and rightest views, Twitter policies should allow the other 80% views to be shared. The challenge is of course who or how to determine when this 10% extreme threshold is breached, either end.

Does Twitter need an Elon Musk?

The above 5 changes Musk could possibly made at Twitter were mainly borne out of his and many other users' pain with the service. In my view, they are neither frivolous nor outlandish, but could be controversial and extraordinarily challenging to execute correctly, such as on the algorithm and free speech.

But then, maybe that is what Twitter $Twitter(TWTR)$ needs, someone with the vision, flamboyance and gumption to tackle extraordinary challenges; qualities Musk shows in abundance, leading Tesla $Tesla Motors(TSLA)$, SpaceX and the Boring company!

image credit: Popular Mechanics