Maheshwari, who was transferred from India to the US in August 2021 and quit Twitter in December that year, said Musk may eventually succeed in the changes he is trying to bring in, but would have spent a great deal of time, money and energy by then.
The turmoil at Twitter is expected to continue for a long time as Elon Musk is trying to change the model on which the microblogging site functions on the user side as well as business — and that’s not going to be easy — Manish Maheshwari, former CEO, Twitter India, told FE.
Maheshwari, who was transferred from India to the US in August 2021 and quit Twitter in December that year, said Musk may eventually succeed in the changes he is trying to bring in, but would have spent a great deal of time, money and energy by then.
“Twitter is in a tough spot today. On the user side, Musk wants to have only human, verified subscribers, and no bots, which is a complete change. On the business side, he wants to make the platform subscription oriented, which again is a big change as currently 90 per cent of the revenues are advertising oriented. He also wants to focus on content creation, which is not going to be easy,” Maheshwari said. According to him, the business model can successfully transition from advertising to subscription-based only if at least 10 per cent of the total users opt for it.
Musk has already spoken about charging $8 for the blue tick label which verifies Twitter handles of individuals as well as organizations. What do users get after paying, apart from the blue tick? Maheshwari said Musk wants to offer users premium content, for which he would have to tie up with major newspapers and other content-generating channels which provide such content on a paid basis to users. Further, such users may also get to post longer videos, he said. On layoffs, he said they are expected to continue as Musk has centralized engineering operations at the headquarters in the US, so everyone working in engineering-related departments will have to move there and come to office regularly. FE
