Former AOL chairman and CEO Steve Case on Elon Musk’s Twitter buy
Case says running major tech firm is no small feat
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America Online co-founder Steve Case has seen a fair share of highs and lows in the technology industry and says that while Elon Musk may seem off to a rocky start with his purchase of Twitter, he will likely get things ironed out at the social media giant.
As CEO of AOL, Case grew the company to the most valuable tech firm in the world before overseeing its purchase of Time Warner for $164 billion in what was the biggest merger in history – and ended as the most disastrous.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. (Getty Images/iStock / Getty Images)
Now, Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter is under the microscope as the most high-profile deal of the day after he spent months trying to back out of the acquisition before finally going through with it just last week.
Since then, Musk has wasted no time attempting to right the ship, firing executives and floating a series of major changes on the platform.
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"My sense is, just watching some of the things he said even in the last few days, he's starting to realize it's kind of complicated – maybe a little more complicated than he thought," Case told FOX Business of Musk's actions at Twitter thus far. "I certainly had some experience with this 20 years ago when I was running AOL."
AOL founder and former CEO Steve Case is now chairman and CEO of investment firm Revolution.
Case pointed to Musk moving relatively quickly in making changes to Twitter's leadership team and the product, including trying to build out subscription revenue and beginning to rethink some of the site's content moderation policies.
"There's some challenges in dealing with this, and it's not just what you want to do, it's also others," Case said. "Other constituencies have views, whether it be advertisers or even government – the European Union has kind of made it clear in the last few days that they have a view in terms of what some of these Twitter policies should be as well."
The former AOL chief was referring to EU's commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, reminding Musk that he agreed to follow EU rules regarding content moderation despite the self-described free speech absolutist declaring that the "bird" was "freed" when he took the helm.
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Case calls the situation "certainly complicated" but said Musk is "one of our greatest entrepreneurs, greatest innovators – and no doubt he'll figure out a path forward here."