AKIKO FUJITA: Well, balancing act.
Elon Musk's deal to buy Twitter slated to close this Friday.
Bloomberg reporting that the Tesla
CEO confirmed that in a video conference
with bankers funding the deal.
The timing, though, making some people nervous.
With less than two weeks to go until the midterms,
there are growing concerns about social media companies
and how well they're equipped to handle
disinformation and content manipulation.
Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Alexis Keenan, who's
following that story for us.
And so number one, we're looking at this timing,
potentially a little clearer if it closes on Friday.
How quickly-- and that's a big if.
How quickly can Elon Musk move to change the platform,
as some have speculated he would?
ALEXIS KEENAN: So I've heard some legal experts say--
and whether they're the right ones or not,
but they say it could happen immediately.
Look, it's going to be a private company.
He could turn this thing on a dime.
So this makes it a very interesting and delicate time,
really, for Elon Musk to be taking over this company,
because you do have midterm elections coming up November 8.
And these companies, social media companies, Twitter
and the rest of the major US companies, they're
all tasked with having a really robust
content moderation policy around leading
up to elections and after.
Certainly, that's been an expectation
ever since the report came out, the congressional
bipartisan report in 2016.
So also, though, Musk is working to sustain
demand on the Tesla side.
So he's got to balance this, but also, he
is having to keep that demand up with Tesla
stock being down since the acquisition about 31%.
And I'll tell you why in a second.
But first, let's hit the fact that neither Tesla nor Musk
have responded to explain exactly what is going to happen
with content moderation on Twitter once
and if the deal really gets done here, that deadline being
Friday at 5 o'clock, though Twitter
has, for its part in August, reaffirmed
its position, its policy.
It's called the civic integrity policy.
And what it does is it offers prompts
to users that direct them to information that the company
deems accurate.
And it also adds labels to content
that it deems misleading.
So that policy in effect, but maybe not so much after Friday.
But also, it's been raised by some of the legal experts I've
been talking to concern about Musk straddling,
not just the work responsibility of SpaceX,
Tesla, his other companies, and then bringing Twitter in,
but really trying to manage and be the arbiter of what
lives and doesn't live on Twitter
when it comes to world leaders.
We've seen in the past, a lot of discord
about labels that have been put on lawmakers' content,
both in the US and abroad.
That's still going on recently with lawmakers in Ukraine
in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
And so does Musk want to be in that position?
That's a question that I hope he answers soon.
It's going to be a difficult balancing act once he
is faced with those decisions.
AKIKO FUJITA: You have to wonder what his feed
is going to look like, too.
I mean, you're talking about global leaders.
And he has sort of meddled in or weighed in on what happens
with Russia and Ukraine.
He gave that interview with the Financial Times
where he talks about what should be done with Taiwan.
When you are leading that very platform
where the discussion is happening, sort of,
do the rules change?
And the larger question everybody keeps
asking is, what does it mean?
Those people who are kicked off the platform
like a Donald Trump, are they going
to instantly be reinstated?
ALEXIS KEENAN: We don't know.
But yes, it could end up being a problem
that Elon Musk doesn't want to handle.
And yes, could he push these responsibilities off to others
who are running the company?
Sure.
But at the end of the day, the buck kind of
does stop with Elon Musk so long as he is
the sole owner of this company.
We'll have to see how it plays out.
But certainly, he's going to have
to continue to try to curry favor in China, in Germany,
in other places where Tesla is operating
and make sure that he's pleasing world leaders, people of power,
on the content moderation level.
AKIKO FUJITA: And we don't know for sure
that he wants to be the CEO, and he's going to be running.
ALEXIS KEENAN: We do not know.
AKIKO FUJITA: It's all to be determined there.
Alexis, thanks so much for that.