The Elon Musk Effect, Twitter’s Product Team
Tesla’s suspension of Bitcoin payments
Bitcoin's price plummeted by up to 15% in the late hours of Wednesday, May 12, 2021, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced in a tweet that his company is suspending Bitcoin as a payment method. The suspension was cited as a result of Bitcoin mining and transactions utilizing fossil fuels.
The why now question: In January 2021, Musk announced his support for Bitcoin, changing his Twitter bio to include the hashtag "#bitcoin". This resulted in a significant increase in the cryptocurrency's price, and Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin a month later. Musk announced in March that Tesla would begin accepting Bitcoin payments. All of these moves over the last few months have resulted in the cryptocurrency's suspension as a payment option.
This is only a temporary suspension that will last until Bitcoin mining transitions to more sustainable energy sources. Thus, Bitcoin and Tesla are likely to have a future.
Elon Musk's tweets have historically had an effect on financial markets. He tweeted earlier in January, "Gamestonk!! ” along with a link to a Reddit WallStreetBets stock trading discussion group, which contributed to the subsequent change in Gamestop's story.
Musk tweeted in 2018 that sufficient funding had been secured to take Tesla private at a price of $420 per share. The tweet sparked an investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, costing Tesla $20 million in settlement and Musk and his chairmanship another $20 million. Musk has also tweeted about cryptocurrencies in the last couple of months, causing prices to rise.
Twitter’s product team has woken up
Twitter has added audio recording to its features, joining the likes of Facebook and Instagram. Users of Android and iOS devices can now send voice notes via DMs. The voice note feature is the latest addition to the microblogging platform in the last few months.
No crop: In a tweet on May 5, Twitter announced that users will now be able to view vertical images in their feeds completely without clicking on the image. You no longer have to click a vertical photo to view it in its entirety. In response to a tweet, Twitter stated, "Images with 2:1 and 3:4 aspect ratios will display in their entirety."
Twitter began testing Tip Jar as a way to send and receive money without leaving the platform a day after introducing "no crop." Esther Crawford, Senior Product Manager at Twitter, wrote in a blog post introducing Tip Jar, "You drive the conversation on Twitter, and we want to make it easier for you to support one another beyond Follows, Retweets, and Likes."
Currently, payment services such as Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal, and Venmo can be added.
In the last few months, Android users have also gained access to Spaces. Additionally, Twitter introduced enhanced prompts earlier this month as a feature that encourages users to pause and reconsider a potentially harmful or offensive response before hitting send. In 2020, the platform began testing prompts.
Also, this year will see the release of voice tweets for Android and the web. According to this story, Twitter may finally introduce an Undo Tweet feature.
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