AFP, published on Saturday, April 09, 2022 at 6:31 p.m.
Elon Musk, the Tesla boss now a Twitter board member, wondered in his typically provocative way on Saturday whether the social network was “dying”, mentioning highly followed but inactive accounts. .
“Most of these ‘super’ accounts rarely tweet and post little content. Is Twitter dying?” he wrote, captioning a list of the 10 profiles with the most subscribers.
Former President Barack Obama appears in the lead with 131 million people, followed by several entertainment stars (Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga…) and Elon Musk, in eighth position with 81 million. subscribers.
“Justin Bieber has only tweeted once this year,” added the businessman, who posts messages regarding his businesses, personal thoughts and memes (hijacked humorous images) almost every day.
Having become the first shareholder of the Californian group on Monday, the whimsical billionaire had specified in the document sent to the stock market regulator that his stake was “passive”, that is to say that he did not intend to influence major strategic decisions.
But he was later invited to join the company’s board by its managing director, Parag Agrawal, who sees him as “a passionate and intense critic of the network, which is exactly what we need. “.
Since then, Elon Musk has multiplied the provocations. In particular, he carried out a poll on his profile, to ask if Twitter users wanted an “edit” button, to correct a tweet following publication. Nearly 4.4 million people voted, and regarding 73% answered “yes”.
The platform then announced that it was testing this feature, which many users had requested for years.
The Tesla and SpaceX founder is scheduled to meet with Twitter employees for a Q&A session soon.
According to the Washington Post, several employees expressed their concern, believing in particular that the values of the richest man in the world were not aligned with the corporate culture of the social network.
The Tesla factory in Fremont, Silicon Valley, is accused of racial discrimination by the State of California.
On Thursday, Elon Musk posted a meme on Twitter, consisting of a photo where we see him holding a joint, surrounded by a halo of smoke. The snap, from one of his stints on host Joe Rogan’s podcast, is captioned: “Next Twitter board is going to rock.”