After a few months of teasing the idea, Twitter is now under Elon Musk’s complete ownership. On October 28th, Elon bought Twitter, at $54.20 a share, roughly amounting to $44B. What could this mean for the future of the company and what changes will he make? 

For Elon’s first major change to the platform, he launched a way to pay for a verified checkmark. This feature was originally for users that surpassed a large following, and were legitimate “verified” people or brands. Now, using an Apple ID and phone number, you can buy a $7.99 monthly subscription to get the checkmark. As soon as this service became available, users began taking advantage of it, impersonating prominent public figures like celebrities, President  Biden, etc;  This led to the service temporarily disabling sign ups to “help address impersonation issues.”

As of November 18th, Elon’s third week as CEO, he fired over half of all full time Twitter employees, as well as a few thousand contractors. In an email he sent to Twitter staff, he mentions how Twitter will “need to be extremely hardcore” in order to be successful in the future. This means that the employees staying will have to work difficult, extensive shifts. Employees who chose to leave were given a three months severance pay.

Between Elon’s controversial decisions, and his massive layoffs the company dropped from 7,500 full time employees to about 3,700. There are worries as to if, or how Twitter will continue to function if its workers keep resigning en masse. It’s unsure what Elon Musk was attempting to accomplish by his ultimatum but it seems to have backfired as even his payroll department has decided to leave the company, and in total less than 50% of Twitter employees signed up to stay on with the company after his email. 

Elon Musk has also claimed on his Twitter account that his new policy for Twitter is “Freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.” Also noting that “Negative/hate tweets will be max-debossed & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.”  He has also taken the action to start and re-instate a few people that were banned from Twitter in the past including controversial and prominent celebrities such as Kathie Griffen, Andrew Tate, and Jordan Peterson. As to if he will re-instate the former President Trump he has left a poll on his Twitter profile where users will have the option to vote in a 24 hour period starting at Nov,18 as to whether or not Trump should be reinstated.