It has now been about a week since Elon Musk took over Twitter. Since then, he has not stood still in an effort to save the struggling company. Many employees have already been laid off.
Landing in the middle of two extreme outcomes
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, believes Musk can make Twitter “really awesome” or “really awful.” The latter scenario would “open up new opportunities for other people to do something great.” Buterin added that, under Musk’s leadership, Twitter could end up somewhere in the middle of those two extreme outcomes.
After Musk took over Twitter after months of speculation, one of his first moves was to fire Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde. He immediately indicated that more changes were coming.
After one of the takeovers in the world of the moment, Buterin said that Elon is “an actor with a very high variance”. Buterin said this during the Singapore Fintech Festival. Here he revealed that he was hopeful that there will be “a better platform for social media” in the next 5 to 10 years. But whether that is Twitter itself or whether this will be an alternative, we will see, according to Vitalik.
Buterin’s Response to Possible Twitter Blue Changes
One of the first things Musk wanted to change after the acquisition was the blue checkmark for verified users. He suggested changing Twitter Blue, the microblogging platform’s optional $4.99 per month subscription, which offers exclusive access to premium features, to a $20 per month subscription. The system is expected to become a new way to authenticate users and fight bots and spammers that plague the network.
Later, however, the price was lowered to $8 per month. This, in turn, sparked responses from many users of the platform, including Buterin, who said the effectiveness of the new reforms will depend on how much is done to ensure blue checks are who they say they are.
He concluded by arguing that “if there is more factual verification, the result is very different” and questioned how such a process would create an “economic hierarchy”, adding that the current set-up is “much more exclusive than even yesterday’s $20 a month level.”