With a tweet, Elon Musk declared “the bird is freed” and the long saga of whether or not he was buying Twitter came to an end.
the bird is freed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022
Much of his first week as “Chief Twit” has been cleaning house. The CEO and CFO were fired. Tesla engineers were brought in to review the code. He even dramatically changed how blue checkmark identity verification works, opening it up to everyone for $8 a month.
But what we’re interested in is some of the crypto subtext.
One of the big funders of the deal was Binance which contributed $500M to help finance Musk‘s endeavor. The support was partly motivated by a belief in free speech and partly by the return they expect from Musk. We’re not going to go into the details of how Elon’s struggling to fund the deal but we’re only going to say this (another surreal element in the whole acquisition process) – he’s now reduced to selling it himself via text to folks like Larry Ellison.
Anyway, many have also speculated that a big driver for Musk is his continued interest in payments technology. Leaked documents reported by the New York Times show that Elon believes that by 2028, Twitter will see $1.2B in annual payments revenue.
And if nothing else, Elon’s favorite coin Doge has benefitted massively from the deal going through. The doggy coin was up by as much as 100% after Elon took over. Bizarre.