No one would have imagined that Musk would one day be called a "barbarian."
Some time ago, Musk suddenly announced that he had held 9.2% of Twitter's shares, becoming Twitter's largest external shareholder. After all, Musk is not an "ordinary person" who just wants to make some money.
As a man who dreams of being on Mars, the acquisition of Twitter stock is certainly not a casual play, on March 14 this year, Musk has applied to the SEC to complete the operation of increasing the stock of Twitter, and the holding is a passive investment form. That said, in order to become Twitter's largest shareholder, Musk spent nearly a month preparing.
This is definitely a red flag for Twitter.
On March 25, Musk tweeted a vote asking, "Do you think Twitter abides by the principles of Free Speech?" ”
More than 2 million people voted for Musk, and more than 70 percent chose "NO," which is what they believe Twitter didn't follow.
Based on the votes of netizens, Musk's next question is, "What should we do?" ”
Some netizens replied directly below: buy it and transform it.
The following story seems logical, and anyone who knows Musk knows that in the next step, Musk may have more Twitter stock and eventually become the real "BOSS" of Twitter.
Based on Musk's special "shareholder", the Twitter board also gave a response: inviting Musk to join the board. In order to prevent Musk from continuing to buy Twitter's shares, according to the agreement with Twitter, Musk's shareholding ratio during the term of the board of directors must not exceed 14.9% of Twitter.
Musk then refused.
The power struggle is sometimes more of a palace fight, with Musk offending Twitter's other shareholders while he has won the support of netizens. One shareholder sued Musk, arguing that "Musk's delay in disclosing that he owns more than 5 percent of the social media company artificially depressed the stock price." ”
Musk has also given full play to his internet celebrity physique, and after becoming a major shareholder, he publicly said on Twitter that "a major transformation of Twitter will be carried out in the coming months."
As a big influencer, Musk has tweeted a total of 17,000 tweets since he opened twitter in 2009.
On average, nearly 900 tweets are posted every year, and Musk also particularly likes to interact with netizens, reply to netizens' messages, as an executive of several companies, one of Musk's main jobs seems to be to speak on Twitter.
Of course, Musk's KPI is also particularly well done, and at present, he has more than 80 million fans on Twitter, and the current US President Biden has only more than 20 million fans.
In other words, if two people spoke on Twitter at the same time, Musk would have more influence than both current U.S. presidents.
Such a frequent appearance, large-scale fans, so that Tesla did not need a penny, to complete the publicity task, and incidentally also promoted Musk's other businesses.
What's more, Musk is still a staunch Twitter user, and he once tweeted that he doesn't have Facebook now and won't have it in the future (Facebook hasn't changed its name at the time).
Butterflies flapping their wings will cause hurricanes; after Musk bought a lot of Twitter stocks, more investors followed suit, and as a result, Twitter stock rose 27.12% that day, becoming Twitter's biggest single-day gain since its listing.
Musk's ability to "carry goods" was verified on Twitter one at a time.
When Musk added the "Bitcoin" tag to his profile, the price of Bitcoin rose by $6,000 to $380,000 in an hour.
In contrast, Twitter, as a platform party, has not had a good life.
In Twitter's earnings report, Twitter achieved revenue of $1.567 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, an increase of 22% year-on-year from the same period in 2020, while net profit recorded $182 million, down 18% year-on-year.
The problem stems from a decline in user activity, which has led to tweets monetizing ads that can't run.
Now Twitter is in a dilemma, if you continue to let Musk go, the final result is likely to be Musk into Twitter; if musk is not allowed to continue, then Twitter will lose Musk, the most influential Internet celebrity, and the unpredictable follow-up impact.
Twitter's concerns are not unreasonable, after all, this is not the first time Musk has entered other companies through such an operation.
For example, we all know, Tesla.
Musk wasn't the founder of Tesla, which was Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In 2003, after the two founded Tesla, they began to look for investors, and finally, Musk, who took out $7 million, became a shareholder of Tesla.
In 2006, Musk was dissatisfied with Tesla's development at that time, especially the cost of the first electric car from $100,000 to $200,000.
The end result was that Eberhard, then CEO of Tesla, resigned and Musk took over.
This practice caused a lot of criticism in that year, especially at that time, Musk had become a well-known entrepreneur and investor because of the success of PayPal.
The public still can't approve of Musk's behavior.
Although Tesla with Musk has indeed developed rapidly and has become the leader of global electric vehicle companies, the Internet has a memory, and everyone has a familiar smell of Musk's current behavior.
It's also understandable why Twitter is anxious to invite Musk to join the board, after all, inviting barbarians into the door as guests is always much better than pulling barbarians out with weapons.
Unfortunately, Musk refused to go in and "be a guest", instead, continued to exert influence in front of the public.
Sure enough, according to the news report on the 12th, Musk, who refused the invitation to Twitter, began to disclose the "reform plan" on Twitter, such as allowing paying users to use virtual currency transactions, while avoiding all advertising troubles.
What's even more puzzling is that Musk has launched several inexplicable votes, such as whether to convert Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco into a homeless shelter" on the grounds that "no one goes to work anyway"; whether to support "deleting the letter W in Twitter to make the word more 'smooth'" reading.
Many people are applauding Musk's approach, after all, as a "grassroots counterattack" technology madman, Musk has many fans.
If you stand in Musk's perspective, achieve asset appreciation, and at the same time, have more voice on Twitter to achieve some of their "ideals", of course, it is a perfect ending.
However, reality often does not develop in the ideal way.
The combination of media and car companies also has precedents in our country.
As we all know, Ideal Car and Autohome have a co-founder Li Xiang; Yiche and Weilai Auto also have a co-founder Li Bin.
And more auto media, have an unclear relationship with many car companies, but also let many car companies taste the sweetness.
So, don't be busy applauding Musk for mastering the media platform, when the car company and the social platform have the same boss, can there really be different voices on this platform?