Transcripts of Elon Musk discussing his plans for Twitter and crypto payments in a Q&A have been leaked. The Tesla CEO highlights his love for Twitter, and his plans for the platform going forward.
In April this year, Elon Musk announced he would be purchasing Twitter for $44 billion, with the deal to be finalized at the end of 2022. In a Tweet following the announcement, Musk spoke on free speech and how this forms the cornerstone of a “functioning democracy”.
In a transcript released by VOX, Musk replied to a number of questions posed by Twitter employees, sharing why he loved Twitter:
“I do love Twitter, yeah. So I want to be clear about that. I love Twitter. In fact, I literally have tweeted “I love Twitter[…] some people use their hair to express themselves, I use Twitter. So you know, I find it’s the best forum for communicating with a lot of people simultaneously”
Musk further spoke on the role of Twitter in communication, referring to traditional media as “propagandist”.
“I think that that actually is maybe one of the biggest reasons for using Twitter is so I communicate directly to people and not through the lens of the media.”
He also brought up the importance of communication and free speech in a functioning democracy, noting:
“I think people should be allowed to say pretty outrageous things that are within the bounds of the law, but then that doesn’t get amplified, it doesn’t get, you know, a ton of reach.” Musk added “I think an important goal for Twitter, really, is to try to include as much of the country, as much of the world, as possible. So currently, you know, it’s a relatively small percentage of the world that is — it is a small percentage of the world that is on Twitter — say, like daily active users, if you presume that that’s, say, 200 million, you’ve got 8 billion people on Earth, that 7.8 billion who are not on Twitter. So that’s a pretty big number.”
In response to the employee question about trust: “Twitter has a lot of incredible, smart, talented people. What can we do to earn your trust? And what are you going to do to earn ours?”, Musk replied:
“I think trust is as trust does. So, I tend to be extremely literal in what I say. So, aspirationally, one does not need to read between the lines, one can simply read the lines. So the things that I’ve said about Twitter, I think, need to happen in order for it … to really go to the next level. I think the potential is there for Twitter to be accessible to an order of magnitude more people, and for a lot more people to find it useful.”
The Tesla CEO commented on how crypto could also be useful for Twitter, noting how payments and crypto are a “critical” area for Twitter.
“PayPal, you know, I think it’s done a great job on the payments front. I think it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to send money back and forth. And if you have currency as well as crypto. Essentially, whenever somebody would find it useful. So my goal would be to maximize the usefulness of the service — the more useful it is, the better. And if one can use it to make convenient payments, that’s an increase in usefulness.”
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