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Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joins the Live show to discuss Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: Yes, indeed. So let's talk about the three things that you need to know this morning, and we're doing sort of a special edition about the Twitter deal, or really, three questions, not all of which we have the answers to. Let's start, of course, by setting the scene. Twitter's board accepting Elon Musk's bid for the social media company, $54.20 per share. Of course, that's a total of about $44 billion.
And if you look at the stock and where it is trading on the back of that, we have been seeing a boost. We had been seeing a boost, but now it's not much changed, not a change at all in the early going. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley to discuss this buyout further and get to thing number one regarding this deal. Dan, this is a question we were wondering about yesterday. Now that Twitter has said yes to Elon Musk, what do we know about what the company is going to look like under an Elon Musk?
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, he brought up a couple of things that he wants to change. And one of the big ones is making the algorithm that powers Twitter more transparent, and that's actually a good thing. This is something that politicians have been asking for, different people who research social media and its impact on society at large, the idea that these algorithms that feed us the different types of information or discussions that we see are really a black box.
So he wants to open that up, make the algorithm, what powers it public, so that researchers can look at it, legislators, regulators can look at it and say, this is why you're seeing X, Y, Z, this is why you're not seeing X, Y, Z, and then kind of go from there. And I think that's going to help engender more trust in it. I think that researchers will, obviously, really welcome this. And look, this isn't something that's just unique to Musk's thinking. Jack Dorsey had been talking about how they wanted to make an open source kind of concept for social media.
So, but it is good to see that he is moving forward with this. He also discussed the idea of spambots and scams, kind of taking those offline. And then, obviously, he has been talking about this free speech aspect, which I've talked about before on the show that it really isn't an issue of free speech because whatever Twitter wants to have on there is Twitter's form of free speech. It's a company that has its own ability to express itself. And so whether or not it keeps something up or doesn't keep something up, that's free speech in and of itself.
So I don't know how he's going to try to navigate that or work as his head around that. But hopefully, it comes to some kind of-- he comes to some kind of conclusion on it as to what he wants to keep up and what he doesn't. Again, if he decides to go all in on content, then that's just going to turn Twitter into a bigger mess than it is right now when it comes to the type of content you see.