Musk certainly isn’t one to go for underwhelming goals, especially not when it comes to his newest acquisition – social media platform Twitter. If you know Elon, then you’d figure out that he has some rather lofty plans for Twitter, but are they feasible? Will he be able to deliver on the targets he’s setting? Will Musk be the new CEO and owner that Twitter desperately needs?
Last week, Musk put down a new SEC filing, securing around $7 billion in additional funding commitments to solidify his $44 billion takeover bid. This introduced a range of new financial partners into the deal, including Sequoia Capital, Binance, Oracle Chief Larry Ellison, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed.
200% in Three Years
Essentially, these contributors would be minor shareholders in a Musk-owned Twitter, while he’ll likely buy out all of the company’s current shareholders once the deal pushes through. This would mean fewer investors to report to, but also more pressure on Musk’s part to ensure that his ‘new’ Twitter makes enough money to appease all his backers. While we don’t have Musk’s official groundwork laid out yet, The New York Times recently obtained a Pitch Deck that had been presented to these investors, shedding light on Musk’s immediate vision for Twitter:
Increase user base to 600 million by 2025 and 931 million by 2028.
Musk’s roadmap also outlines a 5x revenue increase to $26.5 billion by 2028.
Advertising income will likely reduce to 45% from 90%.
Plans to cut around a thousand current staff members over the next year and add about 2700 new ones by 2025.
Again, these are rather lofty goals and it’s still unclear how exactly Musk plans to go about reaching them. However, investors clearly have faith in Tesla’s owner’s track record – which might just be the best strategy. After all, Musk was able to turn his other companies into major successes over time.
Regardless of his credentials, it’s just hard to see a way for Musk to make Twitter a more important and attractive option to users. By now, almost everybody knows what Twitter is and almost all those interested have already signed up. What could Musk possibly add to want to make users spend more on the app? Nobody knows for sure, perhaps not even Musk himself, at least maybe not entirely. What we can be sure of is that Musk and his team must be planning something.
One of the key elements for Musk is subscriptions and boosting the number of users that pay to access the app, which will provide another way for Twitter to cut down its reliance on ad revenue. Part of Musk’s push is that he’ll look to use subscriptions as a form of verification, giving paying users a special ‘checkmark’ to delineate the fact that they’re human. This could also negate the influence of bots, though not entirely – the 69 million new Twitter Blue users he aims to add by 2025 might be business accounts.
The Wrap
If Musk can find a way to improve user count and Twitter usage, then that’ll likely make more brands want in. So far, not many have been impressed by Twitter’s current efforts, but maybe Musk has a plan. It’s possible that the platform achieves unprecedented growth once Musk steps in as a new CEO.
We’ll all soon find out – based on reports, Musk will take over as interim Twitter CEO shortly, as the final details of his bid unfold.
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