Musk and Twitter: How it all started and where it goes?

The New York Times has an interesting back story on Twitter: More than a decade back, the social network was in the throes of a future-defining discussion. As new users discovered Twitter, most of the company was focused on scaling the existing business model, reminiscent of other ad-supported models like Facebook, Google etc. to prepare the company for this hyper growth. Blaine Cook, a Twitter developer, however, differed. He argued for a different direction: the platform, he said, should not be a platform at all. “Instead, Cook envisioned Twitter as a backbone for online chatter, one that would allow its users to freely exchange messages with people on other social media platforms instead of locking them into conversations among themselves. He hacked together a prototype to demonstrate his idea.” However intriguing and revolutionary the idea, the rest of the company did not support it and Cook eventually left the company. Twitter remained a walled garden with hundreds of millions of users.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, lived to regret the decision. He started lamenting the fact that because of ‘walled gardens’ like his company, the internet had lost its way and had increasingly been centralised by the large corporations, drifting away from the original vision of the decentralised, democratic Web. He even tweeted that “I realize I’m partially to blame and regret it.” CEO reins to Parag Agrawal, he started an internal project called Bluesky – an endeavour to give users more control over their data, curating tweets using their own algorithms and logic, build an open protocol for social media thus opening out the data to other platforms, and integrating cryptocurrency into the apps. Basically, BlueSky seeks to give the power of data, monetization, and control back to the users – the core principle of Web3. “If Bitcoin existed before Twitter existed, I think we’d see very different revenue models,” Dorsey explained.

Elon Musk’s involvement with Twitter

Meanwhile, a global phenom called Elon Musk was having similar thoughts. Not accustomed to keep them to himself, he started sharing them with his 80+ million followers on Twitter: “Twitter algorithm should be open source,” he tweeted recently, asking his followers to vote on it. Dorsey, one of his followers, enthusiastically voted Yes on Elon musk tweet. Musk had been chafing about centralisation in tech himself. He famously open-sourced most Tesla patents, so as not to own or centralise key electric vehicle IP. He co-created OpenAI, with the intention of openly and freely sharing their AI research and breakthroughs with the world. The two planets collided – Musk and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal discussed their shared vision and then announced a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder and now a member of the Board.

To put it mildly, Musk is known to shake up everything he touches – whether it be energy, or space, or cryptocurrency. Therefore, the question everyone is asking is how this tectonic force will change Twitter, beyond just a possible edit button, or a mere 30% stock jump. The answer goes back to the original vision of the World Wide Web. The founders’ philosophy of the WWW was for it to serve as a democratizer and equaliser, to empower the long tail, to eliminate the monopolies and the intermediaries. The Web did solve three very big problems for us: the information problem with search and wikis, the communication problem with email and messenger, and the distribution problem with file-sharing and ecommerce. But it could not address the other big problems that it was supposed to solve: trust and disintermediation, of empowering users and making them the primary beneficiary. In fact, with the big tech companies it has created the Walled Gardens that Dorsey speaks of, that are far more powerful than ever before; they literally own all our data and information – something that even Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW worries about.

What are Musk and his plans with Twitter?

Parag Agrawal, CEO of Twitter and Elon Musk are in talks to work on this futuristic, yet historical, reason of decentralised social networking, and hasten the emergence of Web3. This could be quite revolutionary, atypical, and iconoclastic, words that Elon Musk identifies. It would be a different way to create platforms: the foundational technologies of it would be built openly and transparently, and every coder around the world could see it. Users could tailor their social feeds and establish their own rules of what they want to see and do. This is diametrically different from the way Facebook, Instagram, and, indeed, Twitter are built, where “the companies dictating what posts can stay up and what should be removed.”. This is also something Dorsey has been talking about for a while and has been attracted to. Bitcoin and the decentralised web, he says has “the same sort of energy, it had the weirdness, it had the punk aspect of it,” as open source did.

A radical remaking is a courageous thing to do, radical transparency is good, but unhindered and uncensored free speech might be very troubling, with a global clamour around spread of fake news and conspiracy theories. The business models are unproven too, and there are scenarios where users might have to pay to access Twitter. But, if someone can pull it off, it is Elon Musk and his plans with Twitter.