Do You Still Want To Tweet?? Part Three
Earlier today, I was just going through the major news websites trying to keep up with the happenings around the world when I came across the news that Elon Musk has sold $8.6b worth of Tesla shares. The prevailing argument, is that all those money are going towards financing the acquisition of Twitter. It's important that I mention here that Elon Musk like most western billionaires hardly have any of his wealth in cash. Most of his wealth is tied in share held at his numerous companies that he heads. The man doesn't even own a property even. That guy is sort of a joke actually.
As I've earlier said in the other parts of this series, this acquisition will be funded by loans from banks. This again just shows how the rich is getting richer through the sweat and pains of the poor. The poor earn the little they can and save it in the bank, and the rich like Musk take the money at a premium lending rate to do business. I just thought that was worthy of mention. My quarrel isn't with Musk but with this system designed to indulge the rich at the expense of the poor. Now, moving on to the next speculation on the list. You can find the others here and here
An Edit Button
This is one of the things people are speculating will come with a Musk era at Twitter, but it's important we give credit to whom it is rightly due. This feature is one that was in development way before he even made a bid for twitter.
A lot of people are jubilating over the possibility of editing their tweet, but do we really need or want this? In an online space filled with all sort of hate and vices, we want to put the power to change and rewrite the conversation and the history of those conversations in the hand of social media users. This is quite a very dangerous precedent. Take for example, during the Capitol insurrection, a lot of social media post urging violence were posted on twitter both by common folks and politicians. Today, some of those tweets are serving as evidence in court cases and senate hearings.
Now, imagine we already had an edit button. All I have to do is to edit the post and that post automatically becomes inadmissible as evidence of a crime that was very much committed. I'm not saying that all the edit button can be used for is the perpetuation and erasing of crime and it's record. All I'm saying is that if there's going to be an edit button, there should be wide consultation with all the relevant stakeholders before it's deployed and there needs to be some kind of safeguard and checks before it's introduced.
Twitter Blue For All
Another one is the belief that he's going to reduce the cost of twitter blue subscription. Ok, I just have to ask here, are we forgetting who Musk is? We are talking about a guy who manipulates the price of doge for his own benefit (just my accusation though). He's a businessman through and through, and he's certainly not one with a lot of principles.
If he's going to remove adverts from twitter, cutting them off from their main source of income, he's left with twitter blue as the next major income source. In a business sense, the next play will be to ramp up twitter blue subscription as well as increase in the cost of the subscription to try and fill the gap left behind by the removal of advertising. But he's promising the opposite.
With twitter cash cow ( advertising) gone, he's promising to also sacrifice the twitter cash legume (twitter blue), how then does he plan to raise money to cover twitters operating cost, not to mention making profit?
Maybe, just maybe Musk is listening to the wrong set of advisers as concerning this whole twitter thing, because I don't see how any of this is going to work.
What do you think of it???
Thanks for reading.....
That edit button would have been cool sha because of some people that sometimes make mistakes while tweeting but after weighing the cons of having an edit button, I think we are better off without it