At a company-wide meeting yesterday, Tesla employees asked Elon Musk what to do with the Twitter drama around his attempt to acquire the social media platform. The CEO says “ignore” it.
Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter and take it private doesn’t have much to do with Tesla at first glance, but it has been affecting the company in some ways.
First off, Musk sold billions of dollars worth of Tesla shares to finance the acquisition, which has negatively affected the stock. In turn, that affects Tesla employee morale since it affects stock options, which can be a significant part of their compensation.
On another level, there have been a lot of controversies around the acquisition that are affecting Tesla employees on a political level. Musk has made it clear that he wants to change Twitter into something closer to a true free speech platform.
That shouldn’t be political by itself, but the right believes that Twitter has a leftist bias that has pushed the platform to ban or suppress several prominent conservative figures, despite some studies discrediting the theory. Musk has aligned himself with that theory and said that he would allow back some of those conservative figures if the acquisition goes through.
This position has created a lot of drama, especially on the left of the political spectrum, and it is also impacting Tesla employees. One of those employees asked Musk during an all-hands meeting at Tesla yesterday “how the Twitter drama affects people at Tesla and what … can you do to shield them from it”.
The CEO thought about it for a second and said to ignore Twitter:
Well, you know. Ignore Twitter. Ignore. Ignore.
Musk then went on his pitch for buying the social media company and trying to turn it into a free-speech platform. Interestingly, he mentioned during the pitch that he is aiming for about 80% of Americans to be on the platform:
In the case of Twitter, it’s about how can we assure that there’s a digital town square that is inclusive and as trusted as possible and where ideally, I don’t know, 80% of Americans are on it. They can speak their minds with reasonable freedom.
That would be a massive jump from the roughly ~25% of adults in the United States reportedly using the platform.
Musk’s acquisition has yet to go to a shareholder’s vote and the Tesla CEO has threatened to kill the deal if he is not presented with data that shows what percentage of Twitter’s user base consists of bots.
Today, the company finally agreed to send Musk the data. Now it’s a waiting game to see what Musk thinks of the data and if the acquisition will go through.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
