In numbers: Why does Elon Musk want Twitter?
India Today
Elon Musk has Dorsey’s seal of approval and the apparent support of many of the site’s users. But why does the billionaire want to own Twitter?
Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the company for $44 billion. Musk purchased the company at $54.20 a share, the same price named in his initial offer on April 14.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, said in a tweet thread that “in principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for [sic] the problem of it being a company, however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”
Musk has Dorsey’s seal of approval and the apparent support of many of the site’s users. But why does the billionaire want to own Twitter?
A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that "Twitter users are younger, more likely to identify as Democrats, more highly educated, and have higher incomes than U.S. adults overall." It also noted that while the majority of adult U.S. users rarely tweeted, the most prolific ten per cent created 80 per cent of tweets.
Extrapolating from this three-year-old study — this profile is unlikely to have changed since then — there are more than 200 million daily active users right now. And these users can be assumed to have better educational qualifications and higher incomes. In other words, a kind of opinion-makers. And these opinion-makers have a greater population on Twitter, as compared to the real world.
Around 42 per cent of adult Twitter users have at least a bachelor’s degree, which is 11 percentage points higher than the overall share of the public with this level of education. Also, the number of adult Twitter users reporting a household income above $75,000 is nine percentage points greater than the same figure in the general population.
Is that why the world's richest person and Tesla's CEO Elon Musk decided to shell out a whopping $44 billion to buy a 16-year-old company that has struggled at times to grow profitably?
