280 character limit on Twitter: Expand or kill? What Elon Musk has in mind

When asked about expanding the character limit for tweets by a Twitter user, Musk said that the platform is ‘way overdue for long form tweets’.

“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?” a user asked Elon Musk in one of tweets. To the question, Musk replied ‘Absolutely’. “My most immediate takeaway from this novella of a thread is that Twitter is way overdue for long form tweets!” he further added.

Clearly, Musk’s reply hints that the character limit of tweets is the next big change that we should expect coming our way. And most likely, the current 280 character limit will be done away with. What is unclear is he will introduce an increased limit for Twitter posts or completely do away with the limit.

At present, Twitter allows users to post tweets in 280 characters. The original limit was 140, which was eventually increased to 280 in November 2017. Although demand for increasing the character count has come from multiple users time and again, Twitter preferred calling itself a place for briefer thoughts. Whether this definition may change with Elon Musk taking charge is to be seen in the coming days.

Meanwhile, as per a New York Times report, Musk has asked managers to ‘draw up lists of employees to cut’. “Musk, who completed a USD 44-billion deal to buy Twitter on Thursday, has ordered the cuts across the company, with some teams to be trimmed more than others,” the NYT report said, adding that the “scale of the layoffs could not be determined” at the company, which has around 7,500 employees. The NYT report further stated that the layoffs at Twitter “would take place before” the November 1 date when “employees were scheduled to receive stock grants as part of their compensation.