MADRID, (Portaltic/EP) – Elon Musk is aware that the acquisition of Twitter has been an expensive bet, but he is confident that the changes he is making, in his vision of protecting freedom of expression, will end up convincing the most critics.
This was stated in the conversation he had this Friday with the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Publicis Groupe, Maurice Lévy, within the framework of Vivatech (Paris), which was also joined by the CEO of Orange, Christel Heydemann; Image & Environment LVMH, Antoine Arnault; and the Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of L’Orèal, Asmita Dubey.
Lévy has started the conversation with a review of his career, in which he has founded, co-founded and helped found different companies, such as Tesla, PayPal, XpaceX, and OpenAI. Twitter, however, reached his resume through the acquisition that closed in October 2022, for 44,000 million dollars (a similar figure in euros).
“If I’m so smart, why did I pay so much for Twitter,” he questions jokingly. Before being the owner, he was a user, and from this experience he learned what, for him, was wrong with the popular platform. Beginning with the treatment that his previous managers of freedom of expression made, an issue with which he was always critical.
His idea of freedom of expression is that people express themselves, regardless of whether what they say is not liked by others. Even if it is offensive or hurtful.
“We want to make sure they say what they can’t say where they come from. It’s a sign of health in a way,” he says.
When asked about the consequences of unlimited free speech, such as fake news or harassment, especially when thinking about underage users, Musk says that users can say offensive things, but their content will be demoted.
He was concerned that Twitter would have a negative effect on civilization, as the most direct means of communication with the world. And the acquisition a sample of his way of seeing things, of doing everything possible to change what you see that is negative.
Musk is sure that “many people will say that their experience has improved” since it is at hand and has introduced changes to the social network. He claims that they have gotten rid of 90 percent of the bots and scam accounts and the bad things that happen on it. And he has stuck out that Twitter is now the only company that allows us to see the true code on which it is based. Full transparency for people to see exactly how it works.
The withdrawal of advertisers from the platform is another issue that has concerned him since he took over Twitter. He ensures that there are already advertisers who have either returned or have said they will return.
Apart from the fact that advertising is an important means of financing for Twitter, the presence of advertisers matters because of one of the latest plans announced by the company: sharing revenue with content creators. “There will be income to share with the creators,” he says.
Regarding the introduction of subscriptions, another of the recent ways of financing the platform, links this measure to the need to authenticate users, for which reason account verification is linked to the payment service, important to know that an account is valid. real and not a computer.
Because, as you have pointed out, with artificial intelligence today computers can pass the tests better than humans. And “something has to be done to authenticate better,” she says.
PAYPAL, NEURALINK AND AI
Although Musk is currently the CEO of firms such as Tesla or SpaceX, in 1998 he co-founded Paypal, the online payment service that eBay acquired in 2002. In this regard, the tycoon has said that “there was a lot of talent” in this company, from which came people who later created YouTube, LinkedIn and Yelp.
About Neuralink, the company focused on integrating artificial intelligence technology into the human brain, Musk has shared that they plan to have the first human implant device by the end of the year,
It will be aimed at people with tetraplegia, who have lost the connection of the brain with the body, so that they can recover movement.
Musk, who also supported the creation of OpenIA at its inception, has stressed the need to regulate superintelligences, insisting that they can have “catastrophic results” for civilization if generative artificial intelligence is not created carefully.
