by Elon Musk has bet on changing Twitter, but his efforts have not had the results he hopes for. “About 180,000 people in the United States were paying for Twitter subscriptions, including Twitter Blue, as of mid-January, or less than 0.2% of monthly active users. The small number points to the challenge that Elon Musk faces to turn the subscription product into a significant source of income. The Information.
The figures contrast with the ambition of the tycoon who said he expected half of the company’s revenue to come from subscriptions. The differences are huge. According to the computer portal Xataca.com, “It is estimated that with that number of subscribers, Twitter will earn about 27.8 million dollars a year, a very low figure: in 2021 they earned 1.140 million dollars from advertising, for example, but the arrival of Musk scared away many of the big advertisers and now that part of the business is seriously damaged.
The bet
Since Elon Musk’s arrival on Twitter, the tycoon has done everything possible to monetize the social network, which is why the Premium subscription has been activated on the platform.
This service was launched in the first instance for the iPhone and the desktop version through the web browser. Since January 19, this service is now available for Android operating systems in countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand.
It is worth mentioning that the new model proposed by Musk had a failed first attempt, due to the increase in fake accounts, for which he had to suspend the Twitter Blue service in 2022.
Subscribers to Twitter Blue will be able to publish longer videos, edit all the tweets the user wants, reduce advertising, among many other benefits. “Ads are too frequent on Twitter and too big. Taking steps to address both in the coming weeks,” said the also owner of Tesla.
After this trill, the tycoon launched what may become the first proposal. Musk assured that there may be a more expensive new subscription. “There will be a higher-priced subscription that allows zero ads,” he said.
On the other hand, good news
Last week, the tycoon received a piece of news that was a relief. He was found not guilty of fraud Friday by a California jury in a trial over tweets he posted in 2018 saying he was going to take his company Tesla off the stock market. Those tweets sent the firm’s share price on a rollercoaster ride, and Musk was sued by shareholders who said he acted recklessly in an effort to squeeze investors who had bet against Tesla.
Jurors quickly reached a verdict Friday after a three-week trial sparked by that lawsuit. They deliberated for just two hours before returning to a San Francisco courtroom to say they unanimously agreed that neither Musk nor the Tesla board perpetrated a fraud with the tweets and the aftermath.
“Thank God, the wisdom of the people has prevailed!” tweeted Musk, who had tried but failed to get the trial moved to Texas because juries in California would be biased against him. “I am deeply grateful that the jury unanimously found me not guilty in the Tesla 420 private taking case.”
Attorney Nicholas Porritt, who represents Glen Littleton and other investors in Tesla, had said in closing arguments that “ultimately, it’s a question of whether the rules that apply to everyone else should also apply to Elon Musk.”. “Elon Musk posted tweets that were false with reckless disregard for the truth about him,” he added.
Porritt pointed to expert testimony who estimated that Musk’s claim about the funding, which turned out to be untrue, cost investors billions of dollars in total and that Musk and the Tesla board should be required to pay damages. . But Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, successfully argued in court that the billionaire may have made a typo in a hasty tweet, but was not out to mislead anyone.
Spiro also described the now owner of Twitter as someone who had a troubled childhood and came to the United States as a poor young man chasing dreams.
“Irresponsible”
Musk stunned markets on August 7, 2018, by saying on Twitter that he wanted to take his auto company public at a price of $420 per share, up 23% from the previous day’s close, and then by assuring that the financing was “secure”. Shares soared, rising 11% that day, before falling in the days that followed.
Investors who were betting on a fall in the share price, known as “short sellers”, They found Musk had violated securities laws by submitting false information that had driven up the share price, and demanded compensation. The judge in the case, Edward Chen, had already concluded that the tweets were indeed misleading and that the businessman had acted “irresponsibly.”
Jurors had to decide whether the tweets fraudulently inflated the stock, and if so, to what extent this might have affected the plaintiffs. They also had to decide whether Tesla’s board members could be held liable. By answering negatively to the first questions, Musk and Tesla were quickly exonerated. On the stand at the beginning of the trial, the billionaire had assured that he had “never” tried to deceive investors.
He really thought he had access to sufficient funding, even if it meant selling shares in his other company SpaceX, he said, while acknowledging that he had no firm partner commitments.
Mastodon, Twitter’s new rival, is preparing a novelty
The Mastodon social network has launched an open beta version of MastoDeck, a desktop application very similar to Twitter’s TweetDeck, which offers added functionality such as scheduling posts or storing them in columns according to themes.
Mastodon is a ‘microblogging’ platform that uses open source software and works with independent servers managed by the users themselves. For many, it has become the effective substitute for Twitter.
The platform offers a design very similar to that of the social network run by Elon Musk, with posts of a maximum of 500 characters known as ‘toots’. These posts can also be replied to, favorited, saved, or shared. However, unlike Twitter, Mastodon offers a decentralized design and does not support censorship of content or advertising content from other companies.
Now, this social network has launched a beta version of MastoDeck open to all users, as announced by one of the application’s developers, Alex Barredo. It is a version very similar to one of the main Twitter applications, TweetDeck.
“It’s still not perfect, but I think it’s worth sharing with you,” Barredo said. Specifically, MastoDeck is a “fully customizable” advanced web client for Mastodon. Thus, like TweetDeck, MastoDeck is a desktop application that allows users to combine more features to get more out of the platform.
Among these functions, MastoDeck offers the “most advanced” user interface that has many customizable columns to collect the publications that most interest users and thus “not miss anything”, as explained by the platform on its website.
As can be seen in the images shared by Barredo, MastoDeck has five default columns, including the main ‘feed’ one.the chronological publications, the hashtagssaved and favorite posts.
Likewise, MastoDeck allows you to use multiple accounts to switch from one to another, as well as schedule and edit posts. There are also two modes available for the interface, to choose between white or dark.
For now, this is an open beta version so users can test it and fix the latest bugs before releasing the final version.
With information from AFP
