Musk Secures Funding as Extra Hints of his Twitter Plans Slowly Filter By means of

So what’s the newest on Elon Musk’s nice Twitter takeover?

It’s been moderately quiet on the Elon entrance this week, however within the background, Musk has been busy shoring up funding, with a view to fund his $44 billion takeover bid for the social media platform.

As we speak, in a new filing with the SEC, it was revealed that Musk has raised over $7 billion in funding commitments from a spread of companions, together with Sequoia Capital, Binance, Oracle chief Larry Ellison and Saudi Prince Alwaleed.

As you possibly can see from this itemizing, Ellison is the largest particular person contributor. Ellison can be a director on the board of Tesla, whereas Oracle was additionally, at one stage, close to becoming the US owner of TikTok amid the Trump Administration’s push to pressure the platform into American possession.

Ellison additionally has a good relationship with former US President Donald Trump – which is both completely coincidental or vastly related right here, relying in your perspective.

The extra funding commitments will make sure that Musk can go forward with the Twitter deal, with these contributors to behave as fairness companions, which means they will even profit from any earnings that Musk is ready to glean from the social app.

Which might be troublesome. Twitter has lengthy struggled to considerably enhance its income, and has been working to reform its enterprise parts to fulfill tough new performance thresholds set by shareholder teams. Most market analysts don’t see how Twitter will be capable of reverse course and turn into an even bigger money-making machine, whereas Musk has additionally flagged cutting ads entirely, which contribute 98% of Twitter’s income, as a part of his broader free speech push.

However there have been some inklings of Musk’s plans right here.

Briefly notes and missives, evidently Musk could also be planning to cease adverts, and take Twitter completely non-public for a time, earlier than launching a second IPO, and reimplementing adverts at a later stage.

That plan has obtained tacit endorsement from former CEO Jack Dorsey, who additionally agrees that the corporate’s reliance on adverts has impeded its potential.

That’s an attention-grabbing proposal, and clearly, given the investments Musk has secured, he should have some plan for additional monetization. These traders aren’t simply placing cash into Elon’s Twitter challenge as a result of they need to help his hobbies.

Which is absolutely the place the Musk takeover is attention-grabbing – as a result of from the surface, it does seem to be a pastime horse for Musk. Elon is clearly obsessed with Twitter, and his push for supporting free speech, however given his stances on moderation and advert reliance, there doesn’t seem like a enterprise focus right here, it does seem to be it’s only a wealthy man throwing his money round to make the platform what he needs.

However that’s positively not the case. Whereas I’d count on Musk to make the strikes that he’s publicly acknowledged, by way of lowering advert reliance and reforming the platform’s moderation insurance policies, there should even be a long run technique there, whether or not that’s by elevated subscriptions, selling tweet embeds or another imprecise technique that Musk has outlined up to now.

On the subscriptions entrance, my authentic view right here was that Musk would seemingly look to push to make all users pay for Twitter access, whereas additionally verifying their particulars to make sure that they’re not bot accounts, one other of his focus points.

Then earlier this week, Musk shared this:

So evidently whereas Musk is contemplating a brand new subscription mannequin, it received’t be utilized to common customers.

There’s nonetheless not a heap to go on, and there’s nonetheless a technique to go in securing the ultimate approvals that may see Musk’s Twitter deal undergo. However the funding is now prepared, the method is in movement, and reviews recommend that Musk will act as Twitter CEO for a while as the main points are finalized, taking up from Parag Agrawal.

Anticipate job cuts and program modifications, whereas you can too count on Twitter’s focus to shift dramatically inside this preliminary interval.

How that modifications your day-to-day tweet expertise, we’ll have to attend and see.