‘Making Twitter more fun’: Highlights of Musk’s meeting with workers

CHENNAI: Employees given to submit their questions to the CEO of Tesla on his key plans for Twitter, nearly two months after he offered to buy the company to which the world’s richest man has still no complete answers.

Elon Musk, the would-be owner of Twitter, talked to the company’s employees for the first time in two months since he had planned to buy Twitter.

The meeting was meant to be an opportunity for him to assuage employee concerns after the owner of SpaceX publicly criticised the company, its leadership, and the number of spambots on the platform in recent weeks.

“I love Twitter”, said Musk in the virtual meeting with the employees to which he joined 10 minutes after the video call started. He also added that he uses Twitter, similar to few people use their hair to express themselves and it is also one way of escaping the ‘negative’ lens of the media. Elon Musk is set to buy Twitter for $44 billion, though publicly he has made a statement that he needs more details from the company about its fake users.

In the Q&A session with the employees, which lasted for nearly 48 minutes, Musk didn’t go into too much detail about his tactical plans as Twitter’s owner, giving non-committal answers about whether he has plans to lay off force employees who are working remotely back in the office. He did say that costs were more than revenue at Twitter, which does not look great.

He sure has some high targets for Twitter’s future growth. He wants Twitter which has a user base of 330 million, to get to one billion users. While other platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had crossed one billion user line, Twitter has struggled with building its user base.

Musk doubts the number of actual users on Twitter, not convinced that only 5% monetizable are bots for which he kept the deal “on hold”. Yet, has not disclosed a clear idea as to how the magic number can be reached.

The Tesla owner also praised WeChat of China which is super fun and making the people literally live in the app and TikTok, the short video making app which is a massive hit in US. “If we can recreate that (super fun element of WeChat) with Twitter, we’ll be a great success,” he said in the meeting. He may have hinted that the content in Twitter should be ‘more fun’ and ‘engaging’ to the users.

Musk is also keen on exploring subscriptions and payments on the social network. He talked about integrating payments on Twitter. Given Twitter Blue, which is a paid subscription being tested out by the company, it is obscure how Musk plans to change or add new subscriptions.

Elon also spoke about content moderation on the platform – a topic where he has expressed several public statements on his support towards free speech.

He also said “trust is extremely important” and the platform will need to work to get rid of troll farms and spam bots.