Elon Musk: New Kind of Media Baron Comes to Twitter

Tech billionaires had already used their wealth to make a mark on the news industry. Among them are Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, who, with his wife, acquired Time in 2018.

But nobody does it like Elon Musk. The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive, long one of the strongest voices on Twitter, emerged this week as the social networking site’s biggest shareholder and newest board member, rising to an influential position in one of most viewed news sources in the world.

While Twitter is more of a technology platform than a publishing product, Musk’s unique position will likely leave him with some of the influence associated with traditional “press barons — whether in ink or bits,” said Jeff Jarvis, an associate professor of journalism. at the City University of New York.

Musk’s intervention in new media has an extra twist. With 80.6 million followers, he has become an important part of the engine that drives Twitter engagement, central to how Wall Street views the company. In return, he used his position as the most prominent business star on the site to pursue personal vendettas, promote his companies and tech ideas, and — as his business interests spread — pursue an increasingly political agenda.

For Twitter and for Musk, this created a strong alignment of interests around engagement. According to financial analysts and social media experts who follow the company, it is an open question whether this will be healthy in the long term for the quality of speech or for shareholder wealth. “Honestly, it could happen one way or another,” said Youssef Squali, an analyst at Truist Securities, expressing a common caution.

The 30% jump in Twitter’s share price since news of Musk’s 9.2% investment broke on Monday signaled an instinctive hope that his arrival would make a headway on some of the problems. that crash the social networking platform. This includes the slow pace of product development and the inability to reach a much larger global audience.

Musk’s tech skills and strong “feeling” for products — along with the dynamism that has been a hallmark of his own companies — could make him a catalyst for change, said Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies.

In a sign that Musk may already be making an impact, Twitter on Tuesday announced that it will soon begin testing an “edit” button to let users modify their tweets – something Musk has championed, though the company has said. that the idea had been in development for some time.

According to former Twitter employees, years of heated internal debate have failed to resolve the issue, which has been deeply divisive for technical and ethical reasons. Musk “walked right into the middle of the office, figuratively speaking, and said, ‘Here’s the thing that’s going to piss you off the most,'” said a former employee.

Musk’s insistent presence will likely present an extra challenge for Parag Agrawal, the newly appointed head of Twitter. He is already working under the scrutiny of an activist investor in the form of Elliott Management. Another powerful investor, Egon Durban of Silver Lake, joined the board after investing $1 billion two years ago.

Personal connections can ease the way. Musk worked closely with Silver Lake’s Durban in trying to arrange the Tesla buyout, and was a director of Endeavor, another Durban-backed venture, until three weeks ago. He left the company’s board to engage in other unspecified engagements — a sign that his discussions about taking over as Twitter’s director could be underway.

However, Musk has always made a point of being a highly disruptive presence in any company he has been involved with. And he comes with a set of entrenched technocratic views that have won him many critics. As one Twitter employee put it, expressing the kind of strong reaction the billionaire provokes: “He’s a lunatic. We don’t want him here.”

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has a long list of Twitter-centric controversies to his name. “He used [o Twitter] in ways that got him into trouble with the government, he used it to attack journalists,” Jarvis said.

Among the results of Musk’s most criticized tweets: a settlement with regulators that saw him step down from the Tesla presidency and a high-profile defamation case over whether he had accused a person of pedophilia (Musk was exonerated by the jury).

He also used the service to promote a political agenda. This included criticizing regulators and governments, most notably the US Securities and Exchange Commission. When California insisted that Tesla close a car factory because of Covid-19, Musk took to Twitter to denounce the move as “fascist” — but was remarkably silent when the automaker’s Shanghai factory was closed in similar circumstances in the past. end of last month.

Traditional news organizations have long had clear rules about how to maintain editorial independence, said Anupam Chander, a professor of global internet regulation at Georgetown University. On the other hand, there is no way to know if “Elon Musk or any other billionaire is unfairly trying to exert control over the great platforms of expression of this era”.

Musk has lobbied Twitter to relax its content moderation policies and drop restrictions on what people can say on the network, in the interest of restoring the “free speech” character that dominated it in its early days. That could put him on a collision course with the company’s CEO, who said the central question for the social media group is how to create “a healthier public conversation” that will determine “who can be heard” rather than whether focus on free expression.

Musk’s position as a board member, biggest shareholder and strongest voice on Twitter could help push the company to relax its content policies, many observers say.

According to Chander, that could include reversing Donald Trump’s lifetime ban on Twitter access — which has become “certainly a possibility” as “the libertarian character that is so pervasive on the internet” gains a foothold in the boardroom. from Twitter.

These policy changes can create the kind of controversy that increases engagement in the short term, at the risk of reversing progress made in combating harassment and disinformation and ultimately harming the service, Jarvis said.

Imposing a more “absolute” approach to free speech at the company can also be bad for its bottom line, according to analysts such as Brian Wieser, president of global business intelligence at advertising group GroupM. “Big advertisers don’t like toxic environments.

Collaborated with Cristina Criddle. Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves