Having bought Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk immediately fired the previous management and board of directors of the company. Then 50% of the employees were fired, and the remaining Musk sent out a series of letters in which he sharply limited remote work, demanded a regular stay in the office for at least 40 hours a week, and if necessary, work around the clock. In response to the letter, a new wave of layoffs began among employees.
In addition, Musk began a series of experiments with various features on Twitter (grey checkmarks for verification, payment for blue checkmarks, etc.). It was reported that he intended to introduce a monthly paid subscription for verified account holders at a price of $19.99 per month. All these experiments caused an extremely violent reaction from the public and not only. Here is what US President Joe Biden had to say about this:
“That's what we're all worried about right now: Elon Musk is taking and buying a tool that spreads, spews lies all over the world. Do we expect our children to be able to understand what is at stake?”
Moreover, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, turned directly to Elon Musk, which in itself is quite an unusual phenomenon - the UN usually does not interact directly with individuals. In his open letter, Volker Türk wrote:
“Like all companies, Twitter must understand the harm associated with its platform and take steps to eliminate it. Respect for our common human rights must set barriers to the use and development of the platform. In short, I urge you to ensure that human rights are at the center of Twitter governance under your leadership."
In general, according to many business analysts, today Elon Musk is doing everything to bring down the shares of his own company. But legally, Twitter is no longer a public, but a private company, the financial support for the purchase of which involved not only the personal funds of Elon Musk, but also the capital of a group of banks led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, Société Générale, Mizuho Bank and BNP Paribas. Of course, we do not know on what terms Musk raised this money, but it can be assumed that they were somehow tied to a specific deal to buy Twitter. In this case, seeing what Musk is doing, banks will try to somehow restructure their loans by unlinking their financial indicators on Twitter. Thus, Elon Musk can get not only operational management, but also more control over the company's financial performance. Such an assumption fully justifies the current “talentless entrepreneurial behavior” of Elon Musk, a person who is not very stupid. But then the question arises, why does Musk want to single-handedly own Twitter so badly? What does Elon Musk know that can dramatically increase the capitalization of this social network? I propose to povang and consider several options for the future takeoff of the blue bird.
1. Politics. When Musk bought Twitter, Congressional Republican lawmakers Jim Jordan, Yvette Herrell, Marsha Blackburn, and Ted Cruz called the deal a restoration of free speech. But the Democrats - Pramila Jayapal, Jesus Garcia, Marie Newman and Mark Pokan, on the contrary, criticized Musk and his purchase. Prior to that, in 2016, Musk was a member of the Presidential Forum on Strategy and Policy under US President Donald Trump. Today, Trump is out of work, but in 2024 he promised to return. And as we all remember, it was Twitter that was the main working tool of Donald Trump's PR company. So far, his account with 88 million followers has not been banned. And now it will be unlocked. And if Trump becomes President of the United States again, then his gratitude to Elon Musk will clearly have no boundaries within reason. And the price of this gratitude is often not measured in money.
2. Business. Elon Musk began his career as an Entrepreneur at Zip2, developing software for the Internet. He later co-founded X.com, which helped develop the online payment service PayPal. That is, we can safely say that Elon Musk is by no means a layman in Internet technologies. In 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a company specializing in neurotechnologies. And now imagine that somewhere in the depths of this company, they have developed software that allows remote diagnostics of diseases by facial expressions, voice timbre, strength and frequency of keystrokes. What does such a project need in order to become a leader in the huge growing telemedicine market? Only "big data", that is, access to millions of users, that is, its own social network. Sure, testing people would be free, but how much would medically targeted advertising cost on such a network? In principle, it does not have to be telemedicine. With the help of Twitter, Elon Musk can now test any global Internet service that has a human-machine interface, from online technology for accurate earthquake prediction to artificial intelligence algorithms that simulate the minds of geniuses.
3. Artificial intelligence. OpenAI is a company that develops and licenses artificial intelligence technologies based on machine learning. It was this company that created the GPT-3 algorithm, the largest and most advanced language model in the world. OpenAI was created at the end of 2015 by two people. And one of them is Elon Musk. In 2018, this same Elon Musk stepped down from the board of directors of OpenAI due to a possible conflict of interest. What is a conflict of interest? - This means that one (or several) companies of Elon Musk are engaged in the same artificial intelligence. What is artificial intelligence? This is such a technology that, when fully implemented, is able to change anything and everything (more details can be found in the book "Strong artificial intelligence and its cloudy kingdom"). In turn, Twitter is not only users and employees, but also the very technologies of artificial intelligence. And if Elon Musk has some developments in this area, then with the help of a social network, he can bring them immediately to the global level with one click. And the one who has ASI (strong artificial intelligence) does not visit the Presidents, they crowd in his corridor.
Today, one thing is clear - what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter is very reminiscent of the whims of an exalted fool tyrant. In this case, we somehow missed the moment when Elon Musk's head was smashed and his head went crazy, because he wasn't like that before. Or these are corporate games of a global level, about which the vast majority of normal people have no idea. As well as about "The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse.
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