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Elon Musk met yesterday, Thursday, with the workers of Twitter for the first time since the agreement for the purchase of the social network was announced, estimated at approximately €41 billion. During the meeting, which lasted an hour and in which up to 8,000 employees of the bird’s ‘app’ participated, the South African tycoon shared some outlines of the plans he has for the platform in the event that the agreement is finally closed. Something that, for the moment, is still not entirely clear.
“I want Twitter to contribute to a better and lasting civilization in which we better understand the nature of reality,” Musk said during the conversation, according to several US media, about how the “app” is imagined in the coming years.
Among the tycoon’s main objectives, obviously, is turning Twitter into the most profitable company possible. Y does not rule out dismissing company workers for thisas collected by ‘CNBC’.
“The company needs to be healthy” and “right now the costs exceed the income,” he said in this regard. After that, he tried to calm things down by remarking that “those who contribute significantly have nothing to worry about.” At another point in the meeting, he stated that if someone on the staff is not doing “useful things”, then he wonders “why is he in the company”.
It should be remembered that, for weeks before the agreement was reached, US media shared that Twitter employees were concerned about the possibility that, with the arrival of Musk, “heads would begin to roll” within the workforce. Among them could also be that of the executive director of the platform, Parag Agrawalwho has only been in office for a few months.
Regarding the possibility that network employees can continue teleworking, as has been customary in the company since the start of the pandemic, Musk was open to the possibility. Something that has not happened with the templates of other of his companies, such as Tesla. According to him, working with software has nothing to do with building cars, for which he believes workers need to be present in the office.
Checking out TikTok
In order to turn Twitter into a viable company, he considers that it is essential to achieve a user base of more than 1,000 million -currently it is around 300 million-, a figure that would bring the ‘app’ closer to the levels of tools such as TikTok. Precisely, according to ‘The Verge’, the executive wants to take as a reference the popular video ‘app’ and the platform WeChat to turn Twitter into an attractive site where users kill hours.
When asked how Twitter could increase its user base and engagement, Musk explained that the app needed to be more useful and keep people “very entertaining and informed.” What concerns to TikTokthe businessman had good words for the algorithm he uses, which is in charge of displaying content of interest to the Internet user.
On WeChat, a widely used social network in China that works as a kind of hybrid between Facebook and WhatsApp, he stated that he would like to see Twitter achieve a similar presence: “You basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter, we will be a huge success.”
Payments and freedom
The businessman also showed interest in the possibility of starting to allow money to be sent through the application. Users may also have to start paying to have their accounts verified.
Obviously, during the conversation there was room to discuss issues such as freedom of expression in the social network and the fight against spam bots, those automated accounts that the tycoon grabbed to paralyze the Twitter purchase agreement a month ago. Musk said that people should be able to say whatever they want on the app, but that doesn’t mean Twitter should promote it. He also remarked that in the app “it has to be a lot harder to have an army of trolls.”
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