Elon Musk has completed his $44bn takeover of Twitter, tweeting the “bird is freed” yesterday.
One of his first moves as the new owner of the social media giant was firing top executives including including CEO Parag Agrawal; Ned Segal, the chief financial officer; and Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy, trust and safety.
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of 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,” he said in a tweet earlier on Thursday.
Dan Gable, founder at ShoutOut, said: “When does freedom of speech turn into market manipulation? Elon Musk is an incredible individual and is admired my millions. When he speaks, people listen. He is bigger than a mega influencer, he and very few others are ‘alpha influencers’, with Donald Trump being another.
“With great power comes great responsibility. One tweet from Mr Musk can move stock markets as well as crypto prices significantly. We have seen it many times and Elon Musk has been warned about it in the past. The GameStop Reddit community showed us just how fast people can build an army of people to manipulate the markets for personal gain.
“But what happens when you combine being a trusted voice that people follow with controlling the medium itself? This is an unprecedented amount of power. Yes, we have huge media moguls like Rupert Murdock, Robert Maxwell and Mark Zuckerberg but Elon Musk is different. His words have a huge amount of influence and it will be interesting to see how he, as well as other meta influencers like Donald Trump, uses the twitter platform and if there is a correlation between stock and crypto market activity and tweets.”
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