Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Twitter Purchase Back On (For Now), Paypal Backlash, Facebook Dumping Newsletters

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you had a wonderful weekend, and are tanned, rested and ready to have an amazing week!  Here’s three marketing/business/web3 stories that caught my eye:

It looks like Elon’s on-again/off-again purchase of Twitter is back ON. The case that Twitter filed against Elon to force the sale has been put on hold by judge’s order till October 28th so the sides can close the deal. Initial media reports when this story broke said that the deal could be closed as early as today, so we will see what happens.

This deal has always gotten a lot of attention due to Elon’s constant complaints about Twitter’s ham-fisted content moderation efforts, and how things would change if he took control. While changes in this area are needed, it’s worth remembering that Elon has long maintained that Twitter has many untapped revenue streams available. So an Elon acquisition of Twitter should bring a LOT of changes across the board for users. Hopefully we will have some finality soon on if this deal actually happens.

‘Elon Musk’s Deal for Twitter Lurches Toward a Close

Here's the latest state of play: https://t.co/I3JXS6H0jG

— Matt Navarra (I quit X. Follow me on Threads) (@MattNavarra) October 10, 2022

So PayPal recently updated its user agreement, and very quietly slipped in a clause that said, more or less, if you post something online that PayPal doesn’t like, it can pull up to $2,500 from your account. As expected, once this clause was found, it created a massive uproar on social media, and many users began cancelling their PayPal accounts.  PayPal quickly reversed course, claiming the policy addition was an error. Social media, for all its faults, does still give us a way to hold companies accountable for bad decisions in near real-time.

This is bizarre and scary. Talk about chutzpah…PayPal gets to decide what it's users say and then penalize them? Get out of here. I'm canceling them today. pic.twitter.com/aI67Mvsfci

— Charles V Payne (@cvpayne) October 9, 2022

Facebook is abandoning its move into integrated newsletters.  Last year, Twitter acquired Revue, and Facebook launched Bulletin as newsletter sites like SubStack were taking off. Well Facebook has now tapped out and will be pulling the plug on Bulletin in early 2023. The lesson, once again, is to think carefully before you plant deep roots on social media sites that you don’t own.

First, Meta abandoned audio social, now… https://t.co/IRpUzAy56R

— Social Media Today (@socialmedia2day) October 9, 2022

So that’s it for this week, I am now going back on Elon-watch to see when the Twitter deal completes. Feel free to join me, or check out my post on why A Community Cannot Go Mainstream from last week. It’s on pace to be my most popular post in 2022.