This is a report of an ongoing event with continuous updates. As of December 2022, these are the details.

Twitter has a relatively small user base of around 237.8 million daily active users. This pales in comparison to a company like Facebook which has 1.98 billion daily users. What is unique about Twitter is how it seems to always have an outsized impact for its user base. Twitter was used during the Arab Spring, is incredibly influential in politics, and is used by massive corporations to connect with people. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has only exemplified Twitter’s abnormal impact.

Even from an unbiased lens, it’s hard to not call Musk’s takeover of Twitter chaotic. Within weeks of Musk’s October 2022 takeover, people were impersonating companies, advertisers were fleeing in droves, and over half the company’s employees resigned, largely due to Musk providing an ultimatum asking employees to commit to long hours. Musk initially talked about buying Twitter as a joke, with a price of $54.20 per share (420 being associated with marijuana). Musk only committed to acquiring the company after he was faced with lawsuits, and early on, it looked like the company was falling off a cliff.

Despite an initially rocky start, Musk seems to have fixed many of the problems he created. Impersonation grew rampant with the first launch of Twitter Blue, which allowed anybody to become verified, leading to no distinguishable difference (at least at first glance) between corporations and imposters. This has been solved by giving actual corporations or notable people an “official” tag that shows up with their tweets. Another problem was an advertiser exodus, largely driven by Twitter loosening its content moderation. Since then, Musk has mellowed his proposals and promised to uphold all old moderation policies, though not without trying a hostile approach earlier (one example being Musk “declaring war” on Apple). Just recently, Amazon returned to Twitter, planning to spend around 100 million dollars a year in advertising on the platform, a sign of shifting tides. Finally, the employees– this is the area that is still the most contentious, as one can view Musk’s ultimatum in two ways. Musk defenders may say that, at the end of the day, Twitter is a company, out to make a profit, and Twitter is not alone in its firings. After Musk opened the gates, other tech giants followed suit with Meta firing 11,000 employees, Amazon 10,000, and Microsoft 1,000. Meanwhile, those who oppose Musk could counter by saying that Musk is building an echo chamber, especially since now the only employees at Twitter are those that believe in his vision, and his tweets are constantly flooded with supporters. On the topic of Musk’s “vision,” the last thing to note about Musk’s takeover is his plan for a new Twitter, Twitter 2.0, an everything app. Everything apps aren’t that common in the United States, and

the best example is the Chinese app WeChat. Basically, an app like this consolidates many different apps, allowing for messaging, gaming, ordering goods, booking appointments, buying tickets, sharing photos, and even banking. Such a plan is obviously ambitious, and in a series of slides Musk shared on Twitter, he outlined the preliminary steps he plans to take, including better video options, interactive ads, longer tweets, encrypted messages, a relaunch of Twitter Blue verification, and payments. This of course still falls short of anything close to WeChat, and due to established competition it is fair to say that Musk will likely face significant challenges in implementing this vision. Whether he manages to overcome those remains to be seen.

Information retrieved from CNN, Wired News, The Wall Street Journal, and Twitter.