Vanity or visionary?
In media world, unless you’ve been sleeping under the proverbial rock, you’d have read that Elon Musk, after a small amount of to-ing and fro-ing has purchased Twitter for US $44BN.?The entire deal was ultimately anti-climactic with the board making what is largely accepted to be the right decision, maximising value for shareholders.?The commercial side of this deal is interesting with Musk leveraging his own Tesla stock (which took a quick hit) to help facilitate the deal, but what is more interesting is whether Musk owning Twitter privately is a good thing for users and advertisers??I’m an optimist at heart (or I like to think I am…) and think that if Musk can deliver on what he promises to bring to Twitter, he will deliver on his vision.?I have my doubts, but I will be delighted to be proven wrong.??
The Tesla visionary has promised to verify every single human on the platform, take down “the coordinated armies of bot accounts”.?He’s promised to unlock Twitters potential on the back of open-source code (is the Twitter code really that secret anyway?) and building trust within the platform all on behalf of public discourse and a better world.
Musk has acknowledged much of what my own experience of Twitter has been and that is a cesspit of abuse, misinformation, and trolling.?There are some insightful people and interesting sub sections of Twitter but like any social platform, it tends to promote the extreme end of a position on an issue.?Someone once described Twitter as room full of people all shouting at once and that is a better description of the current experience than a “town square” and Musk is hoping to bring it back to a place of “genuine debate”.??It’s lofty – I’ll give him that.
Consider this in a vacuum:?if I proposed a notion that one of the world’s smartest, most charismatic billionaires, with an ego to match his bank account and an army of sycophants behind him, could privately take over one of the worlds most influential media companies, would you think it’s a good idea??I suspect the answer is “no”.?
Elon Musk is a master promoter, but that ego can pose risks.?For example, according to an SEC?filing shared by twitter on Tuesday, Elon Musk is “permitted to issue Tweets about the Merger or the transactions contemplated hereby so long as such Tweets do not disparage the Company or any of its Representatives.”?Just hours later Musk took a pot-shot at Vijaya Gadde (chief legal officer, Twitter) over her handling of the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco.?The tweet itself wasn’t becoming of a new owner but it’s the flagrant disregard for the agreement he signed that is ringing alarm bells.?As a user and an advertiser, it’s hard to have that trust with the platform and the staff when the new boss has broken it so quickly.
Elon Musk also has substantial business interests that are heavily influenced by overseas economies.?Consider the below:
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Bezos is cheekily insinuating that China (where Twitter is banned) may now wield some influence over the platform due to the reasons Mike Forsythe suggests.?Bezos comments are tongue-in-cheek, but the sentiment remains around how the rise & fall of Musk’s other ventures can infiltrate Twitter’s policy and algo’s.??As they say, in the race of life, always back self-interest.
Then there is the old “freedom of speech” that Musk has trotted out.?“By free speech, I simply mean that which matches the law” said Elon.?Twitter has made improvements in mitigating misinformation, abuse, and trolling (they were coming from a long way back).?Musk wants to repeal all of that, and this surely can only lead to a far more toxic Twitter environment.?Musk himself has taken shots at Bill Gates, called an English diver that famously saved young Thai boys a “pedo guy” and has had run-ins with countless others.?All of which empower his band of followers to pile on.?It hardly conjures up visions of healthy debate and civil discourse in the town square that he speaks of.
Ultimately, Musk is one of the worlds brilliant innovators and minds and if he can turn that mind to Twitter, it has the potential to become the business it always promised to be, rather than the chronic underperformer that it is.?For Musk it’s easy to talk the talk while things are performing in his other businesses, the concern is when the pressure starts to mount on those other businesses, will he be able to refrain from using the worlds digital town square as his own PR and lobbying machine to serve his other interests.?
One thing is certain, the Musk-era Twitter will be one to watch.