Tuesday morning, Twitterati in India woke up to the news about Board of Directors of Twitter approving Elon Musk's offer to buy the company at $54.20 per share. How will things change from hereon, for India and rest of the planet?
Elon Musk on record has stated that he does not look at Twitter as a cash cow-- something that will bring in more heft to his business empire.
But does the world’s richest person really need more money? Who does not? But given his charisma and the penchant for speaking his mind, what better a platform he needs than Twitter with its monstrous 300 million audience! Elon Musk personally has a follower base of over 80 millions on Twitter. Having said that, it will be too naive to write off his financial interest in Twitter. Musk is clear about the future business roadmap for Twitter.
At present, most of the revenues of Twitter are ad-based. Musk wants to drive it away from an ad-based business model to a subscription model where every user has to pay a user’s fee. But will it not be a hard-sell for him given that there are several free-to-use social platforms already available to users? This seems to be a gamble.
Musk’s avowed interest in crypto-currencies has one to believe that maybe, he will try to incentivize users to deal in unregulated crypto-currencies like Bitcoin on Twitter platform and earn a fee from this.
Earlier, with his 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter, he had declined an offer to sit in the Twitter’s board as he did not want to be bound by regulators’ dictates or board restrictions. He wanted untrammeled, complete freedom with regard to its operation. As it’s a private sale now, he is not likely to face much of a regulatory hinder.
Musk has clearly said he believes Twitter should be a platform for free speech. On the other hand, CEO of Twitter Inc Parag Agrawal is uncertain about the future of the firm, as he says nobody knows which direction the platform will go once the deal closes.
At this point in time it is hard to summarize the fate of Twitter. Nevertheless, post announcement of the deal the share price of Twitter has gone up by 5 per cent. For now, we can safely assume that the deal has gone down well with the markets.