Will Twitter reduce or increase its 280 character count limit? Elon Musk weighs in

Billionaire Elon Musk seems to be getting straight to work following his $44 billion acquisition of the microblogging platform Twitter. Users have speculated that he could introduce a wave of new changes, one of them being expanding the character count. The likelihood of the change in character limit on Twitter was evident when Musk interacted with a user, who asked him: “Can we get rid of character limits, or at least greatly expand it? One of the actual better things about wechat than Twitter. Would be better for public discourse than short fuses, no?”

Responding to this, the 51-year-old businessman said, "Absolutely." This isn’t the first time that the ‘Chief Twit’ has talked about increasing the character count on Twitter, which currently stands at a maximum limit of 280 after the change made in 2017. Earlier in April, when he was in the middle of the acquisition deal, Musk had said that his “most immediate takeaway from this novella of a thread is that Twitter is definitely overdue for long form tweets!"

Musk acquires Twitter for $44 billion

On October 28, Musk completed his months-long acquisition deal with Twitter and took over the social networking company as the CEO. Announcing the acquisition, Musk wrote a lengthy open letter to advertisers and shared it on the platform. “I wanted to reach out personally to share my motivation in acquiring Twitter. There has been much speculation about why I bought Twitter and what I think about advertising. Most of it has been wrong,” the letter read. 

Musk further revealed the reason behind buying Twitter, claiming that he did it with the intention of helping people, and not for making money. "The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. The platform obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!," he wrote. 

Following the takeover, Musk sacked top Twitter executives including Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, who was quick to change his bio to- "Former CFO and current fan of @Twitter, dad, husband, proud San Franciscan, Giants fan, chocolate chip cookie connoisseur. He/him."