Elon Musk acquired Twitter and completed the USD 44 billion takeover of the social media platform on Thursday. Immediately after the buyout, the world’s richest man sent out an obscure tweet on the platform, "The bird is freed”.
Right after taking charge, Musk terminated Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and other two top executives of the company on the accusation of misleading the Tesla chief and the company investors over the fake accounts on the platform.
His concern about spam bots on the social media platform was one of the reasons why he deferred closing the deal.
A few days before closing the deal, Musk took to Twitter to send a message to the advertisers.
“Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!,” he wrote.
“Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content,” he added.
“Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise,” the new owner added.
In the letter he also wrote his reasons behind buying Twitter.
“The reason why I bought Twitter is because it is important to the future of the civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk said.
On his last visit to the Twitter headquarters on Thursday, he was seen carrying a sink in a video he shared on social media. He captioned the video, “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”
Earlier, he also said that Twitter "empowers citizen journalism" and that "people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias."
"Twitter should be as broadly inclusive as possible, serving as a fair forum for lively, even if occasionally rancorous, debate between widely divergent beliefs," reads his another tweet.
"There is so much potential with Twitter to be the most trusted & broadly inclusive forum in the world!," Musk tweeted on May 3.
He has always wanted to "clear out bots, spam and scams" and he opined that "algorithms must be open source".
"That is why we must clear out bots, spam & scams. Is something actually public opinion or just someone operating 100k fake accounts? Right now, you can’t tell. And algorithms must be open source, with any human intervention clearly identified. Then, trust will be deserved," he added.
Back in April, after people expressed their concern about free speech on Twitter following the news of him taking over the platform, Elon Musk turned free speech absolutist.
"By 'free speech', I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people," Musk tweeted.
