Elon Musk

Fears have grown that the world's richest man would remove the social network's controls on hate speech – but can he really afford to?

And of course “that’s unlikely to be good business for Twitter either”, said Newman. “That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences,” he said in a note posted on the site. “It is hard to see another network that does that as effectively or as efficiently right now.” On Thursday, in that attempt to reassure advertisers, he walked back some of the implications of that move. When the bid was first announced, Musk cited “defeating the spambots” as one of his core aims. In its most recent results, Twitter reported negative free cashflow (spending more cash to run the business than it takes in) of more than $120m.