What the future of the bird app could look like

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at the SpaceX launch facility in south Texas. (Photo: Jonathan Newton/Washington Post via Getty Images)

Last Thursday morning, Elon Musk addressed Twitter employees for the first time in a Q&A session about how he’ll run the social media company. The meeting comes after weeks of uncertainty about whether the deal is happening at all.

In May, Musk said the deal was "on hold" until he obtained more details on fake accounts on the platform.

Ahead of the meeting, employees submitted questions for Musk via an internal Slack channel. Questions fell into broad categories of free speech and conversational health, policies around removing "objectionable content," Twitter's product roadmap, workplace policies and processes, and questions about Musk's personal life.

Changes in the workplace

Twitter was one of the first Silicon Valley companies to embrace permanent work-from-home at the beginning of the pandemic, and CEO Parag Agrawal announced it would maintain a flexible remote work policy "forever" this March. 

But Musk is towards in-person work—having told SpaceX and Tesla employees earlier this month to spend 40 hours a week in-office or resign. But "Exceptional people can work remotely," he said. 

He said the same about layoffs, that those making a significant contribution to the company would not be affected. The company will need to rationalize expenses and headcount as Twitter’s revenue falls below what the company spends each year. 

Musk said he will likely implement a stock-based compensation plan similar to what he does at SpaceX. Twitter workers are used to having an often substantial portion of their total compensation come in the form of restricted stock units, which vest quarterly over a period of four years. 

But as a private company, Twitter could implement SpaceX’s ‘liquidity event’: wherein every six months, employees can sell their private shares of the company to outside buyers at a set price.

Future app updates

When asked about content moderation and what Musk plans to do about the prevalence of extremist, abusive content on the platform, he told employees in the call that he believed people should be able to express themselves so long as it's within the law. Musk warned that while people should be allowed to say “pretty outrageous things,” that the platform doesn’t have to give those posts reach. 

"It's important to make Twitter as attractive as possible," Musk said. "Really, that means not showing people content that they would find offensive. Or even, frankly, boring is not good. TikTok does a great job of making sure you're not bored."

While he exemplifies TikTok for their algorithm and how it has been honed to be as engaging as possible, he likens using TikTok to next-level ADD. Though he wants Twitter to be more interesting, Musk wants users to be informed about serious issues as well. 

Musk believes the best measure of inclusion would be getting Twitter's user base to a billion people–as it stands, Twitter currently has around 230 million daily active users. But Twitter can do more, comparing his ambitions to WeChat.

While the Chinese app has over 1 billion monthly active users, WeChat has come under fire for privacy, security, and censorship concerns that run contrary to the billionaire's free speech ideals. 

But Musk is following the Chinese super app’s footsteps—that combines instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment in one—to transform the platform to be more than social networking. 

He wants advertising on the platform to stay and "be as entertaining as possible”, advertising "good products”—not like the scams on YouTube, as he puts it.  

Musk, who co-founded PayPal, also suggested payments systems should be integrated into Twitter, so people can transfer money (and crypto) and make purchases. He also brought up monetizing people and creators on Twitter. He compared how YouTubers make money off the video platform but not on Twitter where creators connect with their audience.

"That's an increase in usefulness," Musk said.  "News, entertainment, and payments, I think, are like three critical areas."