Tesla, SpaceX, and Elon Musk: What Can We Learn About The Future Of Twitter?

“Look at what we’ve wrought…” This should be our inward-looking mantra as we survey the landscape of the giant social media companies, hopefully formerly—and as my readers know my view, foolishly—known as Tech Giants.

I know Musk has been posted to death and Mea Culpa, but the implications are actually way beyond just Twitter and his own narcissism.

I’ve met the enemy and it is us…

You see, it’s so easy to pillory Elon Musk who clearly has no clue how to manage Twitter and confuses his vision with a business plan.?

Let’s be clear: like him, hate him, or indifferent as you may be, the guy is a visionary. But here’s the thing…visionary portends disruption, and what exactly did he disrupt? And how?

Yes, dear readers, you know my view. Disruption was not of markets but rather by the market…the financial market, that is. Take Tesla, for example. Had Ford been given an 18-year stay on profit-making with the explicit goal of producing a marketable electric car, I’m ready to take the bet (easy that…we’ll never know) that we’d all be driving electric Fords…they would not be the car of the affluent consumer.?

18 years…yup! It took 18 years for Tesla to declare its first full year of profit. Who cares, you say…and maybe rightly so—look at what he created! No one else did…and again I reply, if all had the same access to the financial disruption he did, what else might have happened? Where might the world be, and the car market in particular, today??

As for Space-X, we have no clue. It’s a private company and as Musk said, rightly so in my book. He’s staying private because his long-term goals are not in line with the public market's short-term profit focus. I’ve been reading up on their business model, and it’s fascinating. With all of the various models created to guess its true worth—from 10x revenue to over 30x depending on who is analyzing, no one even pretends to guess it's profitable.?

Bottom line…Tesla is magnificent (accidents and deaths caused by hubris aside?) and Space-X does inspire me…but here’s the thing…Twitter doesn’t have 18 more years to achieve profitability, and because of its previous public market position, it's kind of hard to hide its finances and valuation.

Add to that the need for advertisers. Musk isn’t in over his head, as some would gleefully proclaim, he’s just playing in an arena that isn’t his.?

He’s succeeded by creating his own rules, bending others, ignoring the rest, and frankly, by having all of us applaud the bad boy persona…shaking our smiling heads at the arrogance and happily aspiring for Teslas and a jaunt in space.?

It’s instructive to listen to the folks he installed at Twitter say things like, “The FTC doesn’t concern him” or “he isn’t afraid of legal battles”…meanwhile, he’s already backed off the FTC as this time they are seriously on to Twitter…and he’s re-courting the fleeing advertisers.

The Blue-Check (yes, I have an original) is a minor diversion in all of this. The $8 or $5 fee will not come close to making up the revenue needed to service the crazy amount of debt he piled on to an already hurting company. Did I say disruption? Get it? The trolling that’s going on is symptomatic of what happens on the platform when you take all the safeguards off…the hate, fake, and despicable come out in full display.

As for the layoffs and forcing people back to work, it’s almost laughable, although it's not because it's about real people out of work and hurting…but read the take-down criticisms of him—the e-mail firing, the calls from recruiters at other platforms to steal his people, the departments stripped of expertise. Did anyone pay attention to Meta and its email firings? Or wonder if everyone is laying people off right now, where are all these folks going?

And, as I have pointed out before, it's his right to set the work rules. Quit if you hate him…but resentfulness because of a return to office dictum seems a bit out of place these days, at least to me.?

Threatening bankruptcy, his latest pronouncement, is a clear disruption in our current financial culture. He will walk away whole; a company will be destroyed; people will be out of work, and he will move on to his next obsession…no worse for wear.

There is an old saying that goes, “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” He might have hit his…but sadly the market hasn’t…Twitter, Theranos, FXT, and the list continues to grow.?

Or to quote another true genius, albeit of another sort, Pablo Picasso:

“Every positive value has its price in negative terms…the genius of Einstein led to Hiroshima.”?

And there you have it. Twitter is in danger of blowing up. Maybe it never had a real business model. Perhaps it was already tragically flawed. Maybe it should have blown up a long time ago. But maybe not.?

Its only hope now, in my view, is that it becomes regulated as a media company. Who will be bold enough to step up??

What’s your view?