Elon Musk and Twitter CEO suggest an edit button is FINALLY on the way
UPDATE: This is not a drill, we repeat, this is not a drill. Elon Musk has officially been appointed to Twitter's board of directors, with CEO Parag Agrawal describing the divisive figure behind Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal predecessor X.com as "both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service."
As a board member, Musk is already promising to work closely together with Agrawal and Twitter's other top dogs on "significant improvements in coming months." Clearly, the edit button teasers are either a sign of what's to come or the most elaborate cruel online prank in the history of the Internet. Our original story follows below.
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Mere hours after being confirmed to have recently spent close to $3 billion on more than 9 percent of Twitter's total shares, eccentric entrepreneur and SpaceX founder Elon Musk started a potentially consequential poll, directly asking his followers if they want an edit button for their tweets or not.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
With over two million votes counted at the time of this writing, the results are completely unsurprising, with close to three quarters of respondents picking the "yse" (aka yes) option and around 26 percent seemingly supporting chaos by replying "on" (aka no) to Musk's possibly innocent and definitely humorous question.
Given Musk's highly unpredictable public persona, it's truly impossible to know if this poll actually means something. Besides, owning 9.2 percent of a company's shares doesn't exactly give a person, even one as famous as the CEO of Tesla, the authority to implement such major functionality changes.
But that's where Parag Agrawal comes in, urging his own followers to "vote carefully" as "the consequences of this poll will be important." Far less famous than Elon Musk, Agrawal was passed the Twitter CEO baton by Jack Dorsey a few months ago after joining the company back in 2017 as chief technology officer.
The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully. https://t.co/UDJIvznALB
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) April 5, 2022
Unfortunately, this also needs to be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, paraphrasing a viral Musk tweet from a couple of weeks back that labeled the consequences of a different poll as "important." In other words, Twitter's CEO might simply be poking fun at his company's newest top shareholder... while indirectly playing an unnecessarily cruel prank on folks who've been desperately waiting for an edit feature for many years now.
The plot thickens even more if you go back to an official Twitter tweet from April 1 that directly teased the impending arrival of an edit button. We probably don't have to tell you why the world collectively decided to ignore that seemingly fake announcement, but now we're thinking there might be more to the story.
we are working on an edit button
— Twitter (@Twitter) April 1, 2022
For his part, Elon Musk is certainly taking the matter seriously, deeming as "reasonable" one user's multiple stipulations for a prospective edit button. We really shouldn't read too much into this, but if the feature is indeed in the works, there's a chance it will get some sort of a time limit, as well as clear public visibility regarding any and all of its use instances.
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