(EN) Musk’s Grand Vision for Twitter Faces Reality Check in Asia

• The region is both giant opportunity and enormous challenge
• Billionaire must navigate alien terrain from China to India

By Vlad Savov, Bloomberg

For all the furor about which way Elon Musk might tilt U.S. political discourse after getting the keys to Twitter Inc., his biggest challenges may emerge across the Pacific.

Asia, home to more than half the world’s population, is Twitter’s biggest growth opportunity and arguably a far thornier challenge. If the Tesla Inc. and SpaceX billionaire makes good on promises to scrap censorship, he’ll encounter a plethora of perplexing regulations, wielded by sometimes authoritarian governments, pushed to the limits by a horde of first-time internet users.

The numbers alone suggest Musk’s biggest headaches lie abroad. Twitter’s monetizable daily active users numbered 179 million internationally -- dwarfing the 38 million in the U.S. in 2021, according to its latest annual report.

As a public company, Twitter has repeatedly emphasized it must abide by local regulations. Once it’s a private concern controlled by the world’s richest man, Musk will personally shoulder responsibility for navigating that thicket -- and the fallout if he fails.

“Asia has the potential to make or break the new Twitter,” said JJ Rose, a contributor to Australia’s nonpartisan Lowy Institute think tank. “It will depend on how he approaches it, if he can harness it for his free speech aims.”