The bird is free. Or is it? For $8, maybe.

Seven days and 44 billion dollars later, Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, and it's safe to say the changes have been both furious and fast.

The whole saga started in April when Twitter accepted Musk’s proposal to buy the social media platform. When Musk started hesitating and accusing Twitter of not respecting their part of the deal, everything took a different turn.

That was the start of a tumultuous lawsuit initiated by Twitter, leading to the ultimatum set by a Delaware Chancery Court judge. Elon Musk got a deadline - he had until 28th October to seal the deal with Twitter or face the trial. He opted for the first option and brought a sink to Twitter headquarters to let the news sink in.?

In our social listening tool, it’s noticeable how his decisions or just controversial tweets create spikes of collected mentions in our timeline.

The biggest question - why?

Why would a multi-millionaire be interested in acquiring a social media platform? It obviously wasn’t to make money.

In his words, “it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”

A self-described free-speech absolutist wants Twitter to be a platform available to all and describes his decision as an attempt to save humanity. In this sense, he already confirmed that he’d reinstate the account of Donald Trump, who was banned because he promoted violence.??

However, he said all this before Twitter agreed to his offer and he got a closer look at the company’s books. Once that happened, he spent the next six months trying unsuccessfully to wriggle out of the deal.

In its last quarterly earning report, Twitter posted a loss of $344 million. What’s more, Musk’s takeover has added billions of dollars in debt to the company’s balance sheet.?

Since Twitter’s ad business (its primary source of revenue) has declined over the summer, it makes sense that the company urgently needs additional revenue streams other than advertising.?

On November 1st, Musk introduced a new $8-a-month verification scheme, which would establish a new kind of premium account on the platform. This is a revamp of the previous Twitter Blue service, which gave its users some additional functionalities. The features included undoing ad-free articles, bookmark folders, an “undo button” for Tweets, etc. The newest addition to this list is a blue tickmark next to the user’s name.

Is the online world convinced?

Based on the collected mentions in Mediatoolkit, the automatically generated sentiment report chart depicts that the audience isn’t particularly feeling it.

And AOC had her say on the topic.

All this wasn’t how it was supposed to work. Whether you agree with him or not, Musk has ideas about how to run Twitter and the point was to try them out. He did, however, just spend billions of dollars insulating Twitter from public markets, but private companies can go bust just as easily as public ones.?

Based on all of this, we predict a bumpy flight. But let’s see, maybe we’re up for a surprise.?

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*All metric screenshots are taken directly from Mediatoolkit, a media monitoring tool.