Twitter may seem rather ordinary on paper. The company’s user base and market value are less than a tenth the size of Meta, Facebook’s parent company. Its total revenue last year was roughly the same as Western Union. And prior to this month, Twitter’s stock was below the closing price from its first day of trading more than eight years ago.
But Musk’s bid to take Twitter (TWTR) private has inspired unsolicited input from US lawmakers, rampant speculation about its impact on the 2024 US presidential election, and even breathless, hyperbolic comparisons to the last days of Weimar Germany.
So why, exactly, do the stakes feel so big? The answer boils down to the outsized influence of Twitter on public discourse, and the uncertainty of what happens when the world’s richest man — who revels in his unpredictability — gains singular control over that influence.
Although Twitter reported just 217 million active daily users last year, a far cry from the billions reported by rival Meta, its users include highly influential politicians, business leaders, entertainers, activists and intellectuals — public figures with large followings who in turn shape the public discourse surrounding politics, media, finance and technology. More than two-thirds of Twitter’s US users say the platform is an important — if not the most important — source of news, according to the Pew Research Center. And Twitter’s agenda-setting power seems to be precisely what interests Musk, and what makes his control of the platform so potentially disruptive.
Musk’s deal to buy Twitter sits at the confluence of multiple ongoing societal debates, including about the power and influence of billionaires; the impact of mis- and disinformation; and the responsibilities tech platforms owe to their users and society, and what new regulations should back them up.
In becoming Twitter’s owner, Musk has suddenly collapsed many of these threads into one, right as lawmakers around the world seem poised to…
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