Twitter: still no plans for IPO

You know when a tune gets so ingrained in your head that you recognise it instantly, even if you haven’t heard it in years? That’s what Twitter’s stance on the possibility of an IPO is starting to feel like.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the company still had no plans to go public:

“We are going to remain private as long as we want. I like being private for all sorts of reasons. It allows us to think about the business and the way we want to grow it… as opposed to being beholden to a particular way of growing the business, such as quarter to quarter,” he said.

The reluctance to undertake an IPO, it seems, has nothing to do with the social network’s ongoing efforts to find a scalable business model:

“I have every confidence the business will scale. There are already some days when we make more money from mobile than non-mobile.”

Costolo also revealed that the company might start banning offensive and political tweets in the near future:

“It can end up being a place that’s easier for people to hide behind hate speech. We have to be thoughtful about all that.”

Those words are worrying to anyone who believes in the social network’s power as tool for making real and valuable change, but governments around the wold are probably breathing a sigh of relief.

The Twitter CEO did however say that he was “particularly worried about the Kafka-esque instances in which you receive a court order to do something that also states that you’re not allowed to talk about the fact that there is a court order”.

He also admits that company is still on a steep learning curve. The eight-hour outage which hit it recently, for example, was the worst in years, and showed that it was a far from complete product.

“It’s a metaphor for the entire company. My view is that the company is on its way to being one of the permanent residents of the digital media constellation,” he said.