At a company-wide meeting yesterday, Tesla employees asked Elon Musk what to do with the Twitter drama surrounding his attempt to take over the social media platform. The CEO says “Ignore”.
Elon Musk’s attempt to buy and privatize Twitter may not seem like Tesla at first glance, but it did impact the company in some ways.
First off, Musk sold billions of dollars worth of Tesla stock to fund the acquisition, which hurt the stock. This, in turn, affects the morale of Tesla employees as it impacts stock options, which can make up a significant portion of their compensation.
On another level, there was a lot of controversy surrounding the takeover, affecting Tesla employees at the political level. Musk has made it clear that he wants to transform Twitter into something closer to a true free speech platform.
That shouldn’t be political per se, but the right believes Twitter has a left-leaning bias that has pushed the platform to ban or suppress several prominent conservative figures, though some studies discredit the theory. Musk has endorsed that theory, saying he would return some of those conservative numbers if the acquisition goes through.
This position has caused a lot of drama, especially on the left of the political spectrum, and is also affecting Tesla employees. One of those employees asked Musk during an all-hands meeting at Tesla yesterday “how the Twitter drama is affecting the people at Tesla and what … you can do to protect them from it.”
The CEO thought for a moment and said to ignore Twitter:
And you know. ignore twitter. To ignore. To ignore.
Musk then went on his pitch to buy the social media company and try to turn it into a free speech platform. Interestingly, during the pitch he mentioned that he aims for about 80% of Americans to be on the platform:
In Twitter’s case, it’s about how we can make sure there’s a digital marketplace that’s as inclusive and as trustworthy as possible and ideally has, I don’t know, 80% of Americans. They are free to express their opinions with reasonable freedom.
That would be a huge jump from the roughly 25% of adults in the United States who are reported to use the platform.
Musk’s acquisition has yet to be voted on by a shareholder, and the Tesla CEO has threatened to end the deal if he isn’t presented with data showing what percentage of Twitter’s user base is made up 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 goes through.
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