While Elon Musk looks set to buy Twitter for $44 billion following shareholders’ approval, it looks as though the social media giant still has some problems to fix. Twitter’s latest quarterly report was just released and it showed that it missed analysts’ revenue predictions with revenues coming in at $1.2 billion rather than the estimated $1.23 billion.
This follows on from the rumors that Twitter only agreed to the Musk deal so quickly in order to beat what was expected to be some disappointing quarterly figures. It is believed that the underwhelming revenue figures could be down to prevailing macroeconomic trends that have negatively impacted advertisers’ activities.
However, Twitter’s last expected earnings report as a public company wasn’t all bad news. This is because the overall number of monetizable daily active users was up to 229 million compared to the expected number of 226.9 million. The mixed news was enough to send the share price of Twitter up, but the stocks slipped 1% later that morning.
It should be noted that Musk’s planned purchase of Twitter could still take many months to go through. While the sale is expected to take place at some point in 2022, there remains many unanswered questions and there’s an overall mood of uncertainty. This is something reflected in the fact that Twitter decided not to host its usual earnings conference and said that it would be withdrawing any future economic goals and outlook guidance.
It’s too early to say how the Musk takeover of Twitter could impact how the social media platform operates. The entrepreneur has previously hinted at how he would like to make Twitter more transparent in how its algorithms function. This would expose how the social media platform decides to promote some tweets to huge audiences.
However the biggest change comes in the way that previously banned accounts could be brought back into the fold. Musk has gone on record as saying that he is committed to free speech and this means that there’s a chance that former US president, Donald Trump, could be back on Twitter.
There are also concerns that Musk could introduce more of a tiered service to Twitter that would make the premium subscription service – Twitter Blue – more of a selling point. This would see Twitter Blue completely ridding itself of adverts and bring in a more sustainable form of revenues to the social media operation.
Beyond this, Musk has also repeatedly stated how he would like to defeat the spam bots that have contaminated the social media platform with fake accounts and misleading content. But whether the entrepreneur goes one step further and introduces that mythical ‘edit’ button remains to be seen.
Despite all of the hyper Musk’s planned takeover of Twitter remains one of the biggest business stories of the year. It is hard to imagine anyone else being brazen enough to take over a brand the size and visibility of Twitter. All of which points to 2022 being another big year for Elon Musk.
