After spending the past few months shaking up Twitter internally, Elon Musk is now looking to the future.
Just days after announcing a new CEO, Twitter is reportedly acquiring tech talent hiring platform Laskie, Bloomberg first reported on Tuesday.
Laskie was co-created by serial Twitter user and startup founder Chris Bakke, who previously sold hiring startup Interviewed to Indeed six years ago.
Neither Laskie nor Twitter confirmed the acquisition or announced the terms of the deal. And Bakke, who I always see on my Twitter feed, has been suspiciously offline since early May.
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It’s a surprising move for Twitter, which recently cut upward of 3,500 employees and sold its pricey office furniture, and is still, after all that, being sued by at least six companies for not paying its bills.
But perhaps the acquisition is a sign the company is on the mend. Musk previously announced Linda Yaccarino, an ex-NBCUniversal executive, will take on the role of CEO and he will act as the chief technology officer.
Building a super app
After acquiring Twitter against his will, Musk said his aspirations for the social media company involved becoming a “super app,” a one-stop shop for every digital interaction from messaging to buying groceries. It’s a goal Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has long aspired to achieve and something many companies in China already function as today
Laskie, which matches job seekers with prospective employers, may bring Twitter a step closer to its super app goal and allow it to compete with LinkedIn as a professional social networking platform.
However, Twitter doesn’t have a great track record with maintaining its acquisitions. The incredibly popular six-second video platform Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 for around $30 million and subsequently shut down four years later.
Twitter at the time said it wanted to reallocate resources toward live streaming instead of Vine, but then shut down its livestreaming platform Periscope in 2021, citing “unsustainable” levels of maintenance for the product. Periscope survived only six years under Twitter’s management.
This is Twitter’s first acquisition under Musk, but I’m not sure if Twitter will be able to catch up with Facebook and Amazon, both of which are far closer to super app status than the bird website is.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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