The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, has suggested that Twitter accept crypto payments. In his first meeting with everyone at Twitter, he told them, “My goal would be to make the service as useful as possible.”
Twitter’s first all-staff meeting with Elon Musk was about adding crypto payments.
Elon Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX and may buy Twitter Inc., had his first meeting with all of the company’s employees on Thursday.
Elon Musk explained a lot about how he would run the social media company if he were to buy it. But the $44 billion deal is on hold for now, and Musk has said that Twitter broke the merger agreement in a big way.
A leaked transcript of the meeting and a leaked video posted by Project Veritas say that Musk talked about cryptocurrency a few times during the session.
The head of marketing for Twitter, Leslie Berland, asked Musk, “Can you tell us a little bit about Twitter and payments?”
The head of Tesla started by saying, “Money is really just a form of information,” and then added, “It’s digital at its core.” He added:
I think it would make sense to add payments to Twitter so that it’s easy to send and receive money. This could be done with fiat currency and for cryptocurrencies or basically anything that someone might find helpful.
“So my goal would be to make the service as useful as possible. The more useful the service is, the better. And if you can use it to pay for things easily, that makes it more useful,” he explained.
Scams with crypto and spam bot accounts
Berland also asked Musk what problems he thinks Twitter has. The CEO of Tesla said:
With bot accounts and spam accounts, Twitter has a problem that never goes away. On Twitter, there are quite a few crypto scams.
“It’s better now, but there’s still a lot of that,” he said. “There are also people who aren’t necessarily bots, but they might be operating. One person is running hundreds of accounts and trying to make them look like they belong to different people, but they don’t.
Musk has said in the past that the spam bot is the most annoying thing about Twitter, and he has promised to get rid of it “or die trying” if he is able to buy the social media site.
Openness, trust, and the right to speak freely
Musk went on to tell Twitter’s employees, “I think it’s very important for things to be clear. So that’s why I think the algorithm should be open source so that people can review it, make it better, and maybe even find bugs or bias.”
The head of SpaceX said, “It’s clear that being open builds trust,” and he emphasized:
I think trust is very important, and I also think it’s important that the system works well. Getting rid of troll farms, bots, and spam is very important.
Musk said this about free speech: “I think it’s important to have free speech and be able to talk freely… It is free speech as long as it doesn’t break the law. So I’m not suggesting that we just break the law because if we do that, we’ll just get shut down.”
