Every ridiculous thing we learned today about Elon Musk’s plan to take over Twitter

This is the end of the first week after Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout offer, and one of the strangest tech transactions in history keeps adding new twists. A detailed report of The Wall Street Journal has removed some layers of the process that began when Musk racked up Twitter stock in January and what that could mean when he finally closes the deal and becomes its owner. Taken with additional information from the edge contributing editor casey newton in platforms and a new report Reutersthe image begins to lighten.

Reuters is adding more detail to previous reports of Bloomberg Y washington post about the ideas Musk pitched to bankers that will lend him some of the money he needs to buy Twitter. According Reuters’ sources, told the bankers that he plans to develop revenue-boosting features, with one of his examples being “charging a fee when a third-party website wants to quote or embed a tweet from verified people or organizations.”

As the outlet notes, in some now-deleted tweets from earlier this month, Musk discussed reducing Twitter’s reliance on advertising to make money and proposed changes to the Twitter Blue subscription, such as banning ads. Reuters also reports that Musk has reportedly already hired a new CEO to take over by Parag Agrawal and cites a source who says he won’t make decisions about job cuts until he actually takes over the company.

That doesn’t add up to much of what we now know about Elon’s plans once he takes office, but according to Casey Newton report in your platforms Newsletter at Twitter’s general meeting on Friday morning, it would be more than company executives and board members knew before voting to accept the takeover offer. Newton writes: “In fact, Agrawal said executives hadn’t even seen the plans for the company that Musk reportedly shared with bankers.”

But how did we get here, right? The Wall Street Journal has some color to provide there, citing a “shadow team” egging on Elon Musk’s Twitter bid that included fellow former PayPal executive Peter Thiel (who financed Ted Cruz’s initial primary run for Senate), right-wing blogger Charles C. Johnson (who has previously sued Twitter), and Seth Dillon, CEO of The bee of Babylon, which the newspaper describes as a “satirical right-wing publication inspired by The Onion”. Those links can spell things out for anyone confused by a right-wing movement. resurgence of activity on Twitter and statements from figures who were banned from accounts on the platform, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump, about the possibility of returning.

However, much of the article focuses on the close ties connecting Elon Musk to Twitter co-founder and now former CEO Jack Dorsey, despite the latter’s ultimate decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform and the Musk’s choice to represent himself in a single tweet with the phrase “I put art on fart.” The WSJ reports that Dorsey, who was CEO of two companies at the time, occasionally “seemed to get distracted in meetings” while messaging Musk.

After the publication of the article, Dorsey posted a thread of tweets even though he “tried to take a break from Twitter recently.” Dorsey said: “Every decision we made was ultimately my responsibility*. In cases where we were wrong or went too far, we admit it and work to correct it.”

This sudden impulse to publicly take responsibility included a tweet in response to a question about Twitter. temporarily and confusingly prohibit links to a New York Post history about the son of President Joe Biden, where now he says, “When I found out that we took that measure, we reversed it almost immediately. We should have also reset the account without requiring the removal of the tweet.”

The claim also comes two days after Dorsey’s possible Twitter owner/messenger partner responded to a tweet criticizing Twitter policy and legal chief Vijaya Gadde about the incident, he called the action “obviously incredibly inappropriate” and tweeted a meme alleging the company’s “left bias” showing his face in it. financial times correspondent dave lee points out that this was followed by a wave of hateful tweets against Gadde.

For Jack, the most important point seems to be that “I don’t think any permanent ban (with the exception of illegal activity) is right or should be possible.” For reasons that may be buried deep in a text message thread with Elon, Dorsey believes this is the solution Twitter needs to quickly learn and improve in ways she’s never done before.