Billionaire Elon Musk used a "wink" icon on Twitter Tuesday to fuel speculation that he may update the social media platform with features that could rival YouTube and other apps.
The Tesla and SpaceX owner, who may complete his buyout of Twitter by the end of the week, responded to tweets suggesting users should be able to post and watch videos on the platform instead of linking to YouTube with a "wink" icon.
"It is insane that Twitter has not currently implemented a YouTube clone. Half my tweets are links to YouTube videos," one user posted on the thread. "Twitter does not capture any value here. If users could watch monetized videos on Twitter, Twitter would capture ad revs and massively increase [money]."
Business Insider reported Tuesday that the clock is ticking for Musk to complete his $44 billion purchase of the company, with a deadline of 5 p.m. Friday, or his trial with Twitter will continue, and he may lose the case.
"Unless there's truly some new, intervening event that was entirely out of Musk's control that derails the deal, he'll probably have exhausted the court's supply of goodwill," Ann Lipton, a business law professor at Tulane University Law School, told Insider.
Twitter sued Musk for backing out on his initial deal to buy the company, accusing the social media giant of having fake "bot" accounts, lowering the number of real platform users.
"He knows that he has no way out of it and would like to avoid public humiliation," Anat Alon-Beck, assistant professor of law at Case Western Reserve University, told the news outlet.
If he does end up closing the deal, Musk said last week that he may be laying off 75% of the company’s workforce once it goes private.
The Washington Post reported Oct. 20 that Musk told investors that he wants to cut the company’s 7,500 employees down to a crew of just 2,000.
That move could jeopardize the user’s experience on the platform, one expert told the Post.
"It would be a cascading effect," Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI told the Post, "Where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves."
Whatever changes are on the horizon if the deal goes through, Musk will still have his hands full trying to make the company profitable and sustainable.
"The easy part for Musk was buying Twitter and the hard part is fixing it," Dan Ives, a financial analyst with Wedbush Securities said in the Post report. "It will be a herculean challenge to turn this around."
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