Should Elon Musk Be in Charge of Twitter?

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter and became its CEO for $44 billion. It was then that got people wondering how Twitter will be run by a new CEO. Elon is a billionaire who owns many companies like Tesla and SpaceX. Why would he want to buy Twitter when it was already doing fine with its previous CEO? I think Elon buying Twitter was unnecessary and the changes he made to it will ruin Twitter for a long time.

First, Elon buying Twitter was completely unnecessary. There’s no reason to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars when it was worth way less than that. According to fortune.com, Twitter was worth around 25 billion dollars. That was 19 billion that was overspent on owning a social media platform that could’ve gone towards other things. With the same amount of money used on Twitter, Elon could stop world hunger for a year with 4 billion left over. Elon already owns so many companies, there’s no need to add Twitter to them. Plus he just isn’t a good person in general. According to bbc.com, Elon’s daughter has applied to legally change her name and gender, saying she no longer wants to “be related to [her] biological father in any way, shape or form”.

Next, is the unnecessary changes Elon has made to Twitter. One of the biggest ones was Twitter Blue. Twitter Blue is a subscription service that puts a bunch of features behind a paywall for $8 a month. Some of those features were being able to make longer tweets. The character count went from 280 to 4,000 for Twitter Blue users. Other features were being able to edit tweets and having folders for your bookmarks tab to organize bookmarked tweets. But one of the biggest features that made a lot of people dislike Elon was Twitter Blue users being able to be verified and have the checkmark by their name. This completely got rid of the old criteria needed to be verified that a lot of brands, influencers, content creators, etc had to have. This completely ruined the value of being verified if anyone could be verified by paying $8 a month. Not only that, but unverified people would be noticed less now. So people would almost need to be verified just to have a decent following on Twitter. Elon also made the change that if you are verified, you couldn’t change your display name or profile, or else you would lose your verification.

Another change Elon made was removing a recent feature that was really useful. He removed the Moments feature. Twitter Moments were these giant folders Twitter users could use to store certain posts. Since a large portion of users on Twitter now are younger generations, lots of artists used the Moments feature to store their art posts so they could be noticed more. Now with the Moments feature gone, artists are at a big disadvantage and have to resort to making giant thread posts linking their art. 

Some people think that putting things behind a paywall is good because most apps do it now. I am not a fan of a lot of apps putting useful features behind a paywall just to make a quick buck. All these features like longer tweets and editing tweets should be available to everyone. The old verification process should return and only be awarded to people that actually deserve to be verified.

Lastly, Elon is starting to get rid of free speech on Twitter. Lots of people don’t agree on his changes and are publicly talking about it. More accounts were suspended after the changes and those accounts were mostly people that disagreed on the changes and talking about how Elon isn’t that great of a person. It seems like no one can say anything negative anymore without backlash. 

All in all, Elon isn’t that great of a person and shouldn’t be the CEO of Twitter. He is just trying to buy as many companies as he can to show the world how rich he is. All of the changes he made to Twitter were unnecessary and should be modified or removed entirely. According to cnn.com, Elon plans to step down as CEO once he finds a replacement. This is good news and most of Twitter hopes that this next CEO has a brain in their head instead of dollar signs.