What will change at Twitter, now that Elon Musk owns it? Today’s ‘One Thing’ episode explores

There’s this saying, I’ve heard a lot over the course of my career in journalism. Twitter is not real life. It’s usually framed as a friendly reminder from an editor. The idea that what you see being discussed on Twitter or any social media, for that matter, does not necessarily reflect what’s actually happening on the ground. You know, do more digging, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But experts will tell you Twitter is super influential. And it does say something about the world we live in for better and for worse. So it would stand to reason that we should pay pretty close attention to who’s in charge of a platform like that. Which is why this week we got to talk about Elon Musk after months of “will he or won’t he?” The billionaire finally closed on his deal to buy Twitter late last week. My guest is CNN’s Clare Duffy. She covers all things Twitter for CNN Business. We talk about how we got here, the changes that could be coming to your timeline and why this is way more than a Silicon Valley soap opera from CNN. This is One Thing I’m David Rind.

I want to start with a confession. I’m on Twitter a lot more than I care to admit, but I’ll take the followers if anybody want to come on. But I guess what I’m trying to say is for the listeners who are not on Twitter, who do not spend all the time on the site, who generally could care less about what happens on there, why is this move by Elon Musk such a big deal? Why should we care?

You know, I think Twitter is thought of as sort of this bubble where it’s just media and politicians, other public figures. But it is really important because a lot of the people driving major conversations are active on Twitter. And therefore, it’s important if, you know, misinformation or other problematic content is spreading there, and then it’ll potentially sort of bubble up into other parts of media, other parts of culture. The other thing I think is that Elon Musk is really expanding his already really significant empire, if you want to call it that, with his Twitter acquisition. You know, he now controls companies that are developing cars, that are developing solar panels, that are developing satellite.

He’s providing Internet to Ukraine.

Yeah, I mean, it’s just huge. And now he’s got this massive media platform. It’s not totally unlike, you know, Jeff Bezos owning The Washington Post, Marc Benioff owning TIME magazine. But with Twitter, unlike with those other media properties, Elon will potentially have a lot greater sort of role in deciding how it moderates content and the policies and procedures that are in place there.

Okay. So that’s helpful. So now I need a refresher. So sorry to have to ask you to do this, but how did we get here?

Oh, it’s been a journey. So Elon Musk has always been a really avid Twitter user. It’s always been an important part of his brand. He tweets all kinds of random stuff there. He engages with regular people who are fans of his companies, and so he’s always been a big persona. On Twitter.

He recently questioned the relevance of Twitter writing, quote, Is Twitter dying? And he suggested that Twitter should consider removing the W from its name.

So in January, Elon Musk started buying up a large number of Twitter shares. We didn’t end up hearing about that until April, when he announced that he’d become Twitter’s largest shareholder with about 9% of the company, he gets an offer to join Twitter’s board. He accepts the offer to join Twitter’s board. Days later, he turns down the offer to join Twitter’s board and said he’s going to make a bid to buy the company.

We have some breaking news right now. Elon Musk is buying Twitter for an estimated $44 billion.

He ended up making this really significant bid to buy the company $54.20 a share, which was a huge premium over Twitter’s trading share price. And basically something that the board was going to have a really hard time saying no to.

It was on. It was off. It was off.

Now it’s on, it’s on.

So they end up signing a deal, agreeing to sell the company to Elon Musk, and then…

And we want to go find out what the heck’s going on.

Within a couple of weeks, he starts raising these questions about bots on Twitter. And, you know, there’s too many fake accounts on Twitter. You know, it’s a big problem. And it was kind of interesting because initially he’d said that bots were a reason that he wanted to buy. The company said we will defeat the spam bots or die trying.

Right.

The billionaire CEO announcing just hours ago that the $44 billion deal to take Twitter private is now on hold.

So then you get Elon saying the deal is on hold, which is not really a thing. And then you get Elon saying, I’m terminating the deal because there’s too many bots on Twitter. Twitter has been misleading about the number of bots on the platform, and that’s when the whole sort of legal battle begins.

Twitter arguing in court. What we have here is a buyer looking to conjure an exit ramp for a deal that doesn’t have one.

So the two are sort of preparing for trial. It’s this really contentious legal battle. And then we heard from this whistleblower.

Why are you coming forward?

All my life, I’ve been about finding places where I can go and make a difference.

We received a copy of his whistleblower disclosure that he’d filed with numerous government agencies. It was, you know, making really major allegations about the company’s security shortcomings, you know, suggesting that it’s out of compliance with an FTC order.

CNN and The Washington Post obtained a copy of the disclosure from a senior Democratic official on Capitol Hill. In it, Zatko claims nearly half of Twitter’s employees have access to some of the platform’s main critical controls.

And my colleague Donie O’Sullivan spoke with the whistleblower. His name is Peter Zatko, but he’s better known as “Mudge” in the hacking community. And, you know, he said that he didn’t make this disclosure because of the deal, because of Musk. You know, he felt like this is such an important platform and it was important for users and for the world to be aware of some of these vulnerabilities.

Your whole perception of the world is made from what you are seeing, reading and consuming online, and if you don’t have an understanding of what’s real, what’s not. Yeah. I think this is pretty scary.

And how did Elon respond to that?

Yeah, I mean, this was just another reason for Elon Musk to potentially get out of the deal. You know, he said that these are things that Twitter should have disclosed not only to him in the process, but also maybe in some of their filings to government agencies. You know, it’s come out in the court process that Twitter made a $7 million payout to the Twitter whistleblower over the summer. And this is you know, Elon said this is something that you should have disclosed to me as your incoming owner, although the sort of questions about whether that was really going to happen had already started to bubble up at that time. So this legal battle is playing out. We’re getting close to the court date and about two weeks before, the two sides were set to go to trial over this.

Twitter now confirms that Elon Musk did re offer to buy the social media giant at the original price.

Elon Musk sends a letter to Twitter saying that he wants to go forward with the deal as originally proposed. He’s willing to pay the $54.20 and he wants the trial to be adjourned. He’s ready to go ahead with the deal.

Can I get the past two months of my life back?

This is done now.

I don’t know.

Twitter was not so sure that he was going to actually follow through with his word this time. And so the judge ultimately put a pause on the litigation, said Musk would have until October 28th at 5 p.m. to close the deal or they would reschedule the trial.

In a tweet, Musk wrote, Entering Twitter HQ. Let that sink in. And right there you can see him walking into Twitter headquarters, smiling, holding a large sink.

So late last week, Elon Musk visited Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, and now he controls the company.

Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter takeover is official. He’s already started firing people, including Parag Agarwal and two other executives. That according to two sources. It’s pretty unbelievable.

And now the question is, what is Elon Musk going to do with Twitter?

Okay. So, Claire, before the break, you mentioned “question is, what is Elon Musk going to do with Twitter?” So, what what is the answer? What are we going to see here?

There are a lot of things that could change. You know, there have been all kinds of rumors about Elon Musk’s plan to cut down on the number of staff members at Twitter, you know, make changes to its content moderation. I think that’ll be the biggest thing that people will be paying attention to in the days after this is closed.

There was all this talk of will former President Trump be back allowed in? Is is that the concern that it’s just going to be kind of a free for all?

Yeah, I think it is. You know, Musk has said he wants to, you know, make this more open to free speech, which I think is a little open to interpretation. But he wants to limit the content, moderation on Twitter and reverse some of these permanent bans like that of President Trump. But he’s not the only one. You know I think you could see other sort of controversial or far right accounts that have been banned for repeatedly violating Twitter’s rules coming back to the platform pretty quickly.

And the idea of former President Trump coming back on makes me think we’re just right up against the midterms. What are the concerns about possible misinformation as it relates to results coming in?

I think it’s a huge question here. Twitter, although it’s a smaller platform, has for a long time been sort of a leader in the social media industry, you know, acting as a model for how other companies should handle problematic content or misinformation around elections. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to play that same role this year. And if Trump comes back before the midterms, you know, he has said that he plans to stay on his platform, Truth Social. But if he returns to Twitter, he’ll have tens of millions more followers. It seems hard to deny that. And, you know, I think it could make a huge difference. Trump has such a huge influence on voters. And if he has that massive microphone back, you know, both ahead of the midterms, but also the 2024 presidential election, I think it could be really influential.

Okay. So what other changes or quote unquote improvements has Elon Musk proposed?

He’s also thrown around some other sort of more out there, ideas like open sourcing, Twitter’s algorithm. But, you know, specifically last week, he sent a message to Twitter’s advertisers to sort of try and reassure them about operating on the platform. You know, he’s previously said that he wants to move away from the advertising model, rely more on subscriptions. But the majority of Twitter’s revenue currently comes from advertising. And so that’s a really important thing for him to sort out here. You know, he told advertisers in an open letter on the platform that he doesn’t want Twitter to become a he said “free for all hellscape.” You know, he wants to make it a safe enough platform that advertisers will still want to be doing business there.

Like he realizes that he needs the advertisers to some extent in order to make money.

Exactly. And he said that Twitter isn’t going to be a moneymaking venture for him, like he’s not trying to grow his own personal wealth. But in order for it to keep operating as a company, he’s going to need these advertisers for now.

So I want to go back to what you said earlier about his concerns about bots, because that seemed to be a big sticking point for him when he was doing his whole dance with what he buy the company or not. Can you explain what he’s talking about and is he just kind of over it now that he owns the company? Like, what’s the deal?

Yeah, it’s always a bit strange that he became so worried about the bot issue or purported to be so worried about the bot issue. Everybody knows there’s bots on Twitter. Elon Musk best of all, because they engage in his comments all the time. You know, you see accounts that are impersonating him or trying to sort of shill cryptocurrencies. And his replies it’s a thing that everybody knows exists. And there are also a lot of good bots on Twitter, you know, accounts that spread news or weather information and, you know, these non problematic sort of automated accounts. I don’t know that he is over it necessarily always said that this he felt like this was a detractor from the platform that he wanted to solve this issue. But it’s really complicated. You know, in the process of this whole storyline playing out, I’ve talked to a lot of experts about bots on Twitter and the landscape broadly, and it’s it’s a really complicated issue. It’s not such a black and white. This is a bot. This isn’t a bot. Elon Musk has made this proposal that every user on Twitter should be verified, that they should somehow verify their.

That they’re a real human.

That there are real human, yeah. Verify their identity. That gets into a lot of sort of tricky privacy concerns and concerns about if you’re a person in a foreign country with a hostile government that you’re speaking out against, you know, could the government, find out your identity. There’s a lot of potential issues with that. But that is one way that he’s proposed handling this problem.

That sounds like a lot of work to do for somebody who might be planning to lay off a big chunk of the company.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a big question. As you know, he’s planning to lay off. It’s kind of unclear. He said last week that it wasn’t going to be 75% of the company as had been previously reported. But I think he is probably planning on laying off a good chunk of the employees. And the question is what kind of impact that will have on the product, on the content, moderation, you know, on the functioning of the ad business. I think there’s a lot of questions around that.

Did Elon Musk ever actually want to buy Twitter or is this all just a stunt from the start? Like what was all this year of drama for?

It’s a great question. I think in some ways he did want to buy Twitter. I mean, this has been like his favorite plaything, his favorite way of reaching his fans and hitting back at his detractors for a long time. And so I think that prospect of running it was probably really attractive. And I think he also wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to end up getting restricted or banned from Twitter like he likes to say, a lot of controversial things, nothing that’s ever actually broken the rules. But I think he wanted to make sure that he could maintain this platform that he really loved. I think he realized he was overpaying for it. I think he’s still willing to admit that he’s overpaying for it, but obviously realized that he wasn’t going to be able to back out of this deal.

And now he owns Twitter. Clare Duffy, thanks very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

One thing is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me David Rind. Our production manager is Matt Dempsey. Greg Peppers is our supervising producer. Faiz Jamil is our senior producer and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Abbie Fentress Swanson. Just one more thing before we go. As we get closer to Election Day, CNN is looking to hear about your voting experience. If you’ve had any issues voting or receiving disinformation about voting or the midterms, head over to CNN.com/voting issues. Again, that’s, CNN.com/votingissues to share your stories. We really appreciate it. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next Sunday. And like I said, you can find me on Twitter in the meantime. Talk to you later.