The now safe passage of Twitter under the control of Tesla’s Elon Musk continues to be discussed, with the positions of various important figures, the first doubts of employees and the fears of users.
For a few days it has been official that Twitter will pass into the hands of Elon Musk of Tesla, for a figure of around 44 billion dollars and, even if the final word will be said by the market control authorities, the operation is now given for fact and consequently, the positions taken with regard to the sudden outcome of the affair have multiplied.
The first news since the Twitter board was convinced to accept the proposed acquisition of Elon Musk concerns a new stance by former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey. The current leader of the crypto-company Block explained that, in his day, Twitter belonged to Wall Street and the advertising model and that, therefore, removing it from that was the correct first step. On the other hand, he doesn’t believe anyone should own or operate Twitter as a business, since it should be “a public good at the protocol level”. If, however, that is to happen, he would tend to trust Musk as his purpose “to make the platform as reliable and widely inclusive is the right one”.
The point of view of the current CEO, Parag Agrawal, is not yet known, although it does not bode well that the research company Equilar has begun to calculate how much Agrawal would take if he were fired within 12 months of the acquisition: specifically, taking into account a year’s salary and accelerated stock premium accruals, the young Indian-born executive could leave Twitter with $ 42 million in his pocket.
Musk, according to TechCrunch, has never had a good relationship with Tesla employees, both when he ignored their concerns about returning to the office in the midst of the pandemic, and when he faced criticism of safety at work. also serving some lawsuits for racial discrimination (with a sentence of paying 137 million dollars to a former black employee). It is normal, therefore, that many Twitter employees are worried about the acquisition of him, even if the current CEO has reassured them by explaining that at the moment there are no layoffs. Prevention, however, is better than cure and, therefore, according to Bloomberg, to prevent some employees from sabotaging the platform, the source code of the platform has been blocked, to prevent unauthorized changes (which, to date, must all go through the approval of a vice president).
Meanwhile, Tesla and Space X’s deus ex machina has returned to tweet on the subject of free speech and censorship, explaining that for him free speech is what establishes the law (which, however, varies from national context to context national, as in the case of Europe, which for example has the Digital Services Act with the aim of stemming disinformation), while censorship is to go beyond the law: in the event that someone wants less freedom of speech on Twitter, they should not to do more than ask the government for more restrictive laws.
What is certain is that many are worried about his descent into the field, as demonstrated by the reinvigoration of several micro-socials, even from different backgrounds: in the past few hours, in fact, Mastodon, the decentralized social network that does not profile users and which entrusts to its community the responsibility of management, has announced that he has noticed an unusual peak in subscriptions, while in the App Store to lead the ranking of the most downloaded apps is even the ultra-conservative social network Truth, founded by former US President Donald Trump .