After the announcement of Musk’s acquisition, hundreds of thousands have left the platform.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, recently caused quite a shakeup at Twitter after acquiring the public company for $44 billion, where after approval, will be taking it private.
The decision to acquire the company came after Musk quietly purchased $2.2 billion in Twitter stock, or about 9 percent of the company, in the first few months of 2022, making him the company’s largest shareholder at the time.
After becoming a major shareholder, Musk was then appointed to the Twitter board of directors, which he accepted and then declined the role just days later, with some speculating that he declined due to a rule that he would be limited to owning 15 percent of the company, which would not give him decision making power to enact real change on the platform.
Once the purchase goes through, it is not exactly clear how Musk will change things around on Twitter, though many are confident that he will remove censorship tactics the company has been using across the platform.
A string of left-wing progressive Twitter users have also quit the platform amid Musk’s purchase, despite him calling for the platform to be “politically neutral.”
“For Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” Musk said in an April 27 Tweet. He also said he is “against censorship that goes far beyond the law”.
“Attacks are coming thick and fast, primarily from the left, which is no surprise, however I should be clear that the right will probably be a little unhappy too,” he added. “My goal is to maximize area under the curve of total human happiness, which means the ~80% of people in the middle.”
