Will people pay $8 a month for Twitter?

longer a public company, but it is being run in a more public way than ever before. Elon Musk, who took the social network private on October 27th at a cost of $44bn and immediately installed himself as its temporary chief executive, has been developing his plans for the firm through the medium of tweets at all times of day and night.Mr Musk, who said he was buying Twitter to protect free speech in “the de facto public town square”, tweeted on his first full day in charge that the company would set up a “content moderation council”. Outsourcing moderation dilemmas to an independent board, as Facebook has since 2020, would be no bad thing. One of the chief concerns about Mr Musk’s ownership of Twitter is that the platform could be leant on by anyone with leverage over his other, larger businesses. Tesla, Mr Musk’s carmaker (and main source of wealth), has a factory in Shanghai and last year made a quarter of its revenue in China, whose public squares are hardly free.