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After flirting with the idea, making an offer, and being forced by a court to follow through, Elon Musk finally acquired Twitter (NASDAQ: TWTR) two weeks ago. Since then, it’s been a storm that’s seen nearly half the staff members fired amid mounting questions on how Musk intends to make Twitter profitable. His answer—making Twitter an everything app, just like WeChat.
While he has toyed with several ideas on how to generate revenue with Twitter, the Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO finally elaborated on his plan for the social media company via a Twitter Spaces gathering this week.
Musk’s grand plan is to make Twitter the everything app where users can catch up with the latest news, make payments, conduct business, monetize their content, and more. The idea, inspired by the 1 billion-user Chinese super-app WeChat, would see Twitter expand beyond its business model and take Musk back to his online payment roots.
“The rate of evolution of Twitter will be an immense step change compared to what it has been in the past. You know, if nothing else, I am a technologist and I can make technology go fast. And that’s what you’ll see happen at Twitter,” Musk said.
The Space session included key advertisers whom Twitter has relied on for over 80% of its revenue. However, with Musk’s antics and the shakeups at the company—which included the firing of the CEO and CFO—several big advertisers have considered scaling back their relationships with Twitter.
Musk has dismissed such moves and claimed that Twitter could generate revenue in other sustainable ways. One of these is through an $8 Twitter Blue subscription model that will hand users the much-coveted verification check mark.
On the Space session, Musk took a step back from his extremist stands, pledging to make Twitter better for advertisers by eliminating bots and trolls.
“Actually, we’ve been more rigorous about clamping down on bad content and bots and trolls, not less. So my observation of Twitter over the past few weeks is that the content is actually improving,” Musk noted.
As Musk works on stabilizing Twitter after tumultuous few weeks, crypto bros are hopeful that it will translate into better fortunes after what has been a year to forget. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is reportedly among those who stand to gain the most after investing in the Twitter takeover, but others, like the Dogecoin army, are hopeful that the meme token could become the de facto currency of the new everything app.
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