Elon Musk hit Twitter at the weekend to share various thoughts and ideas — and a few jokes — on his vision for the future of the microblogging service.
Having recently become Twitter’s single biggest shareholder and been offered a place on the company’s board (since declined), Musk will likely be pushing for at least some of his ideas to become a reality in the coming months.
One notable suggestion may have been offered tongue-in-cheek but it was quickly supported by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It’s an idea to convert Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter “since no one shows up anyway” — a reference to Twitter’s pandemic-related decision to let its employees work from home if they wished. Musk ran a poll on the offbeat idea, with 91% of the two million respondents agreeing with the proposal. Interestingly, the tweet has since been deleted.
Responding to Musk’s suggestion, fellow billionaire Bezos tweeted that, at the very least a part of the building could realistically be converted into a shelter as Amazon has already done just that at its Seattle headquarters.
Or do portion. Worked out great and makes it easy for employees who want to volunteer. https://t.co/r0dZWsMxWT https://t.co/NbUNl1bkJ3
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) April 10, 2022
In another tweet, Musk said he would prefer it if Twitter had no ads, explaining: “The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive.” However, he failed to say how the company would cover Twitter’s lost ad revenue, which in the last quarter totaled $1.4 billion.
In one of his less controversial musings, Musk suggested to his 81 million Twitter followers that anyone who signs up for Twitter Blue — the $3-a-month tier that offers more features — should be automatically given an authentication mark. However, he added that the mark should be different from the checkmark given to public figures and official accounts.
Discussing the edit button, which Musk’s own recent Twitter poll suggested around three-quarters of users want, the billionaire entrepreneur said that while Twitter Blue has something close to it in the form of an undo button, he found the feature to be of little use and so had turned it off. He hasn’t yet explained how he would implement a more useful edit function, but no doubt he’ll be sharing some ideas on that particular subject soon.
The boss of SpaceX and Tesla also found time to launch a rather more absurd poll asking if the “w” should be removed from Twitter’s name, with the two voting options listed as “yes” and “of course.”
Delete the w in twitter?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 10, 2022
When Musk learned last week that he’d been offered a seat on Twitter’s board, he tweeted that he was looking forward to working with the team “to make significant improvements to Twitter,” though how much influence he will really have remains to be seen.
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