Twitter Molts
Elon Musk takes Twitter back into the unknown…
Well, I was wrong. Happens to the best of us. Elon Musk did, in fact, buy Twitter. Or rather, he has an agreement to. I still both cannot believe it and absolutely can. My mistake was that I was relying on my old trusted Occam’s razor when it came to the deal, when I really should have been relying on Elon’s razor. That is, “the most entertaining outcome is the most likely”.¹
And I, of all people, should have known this. Nearly four years ago I wrote about the game of not just “3D Chess” which Musk seems to like to play, but rather “3D Zany Chess” — that is, the most chaotic and entertaining variety, obviously. The maneuver back then, “funding secured” was zany. But personally buying Twitter with enough leverage to stretch to Mars is something else entirely. It sure feels like this move will go down with Musk either looking brilliant or bankrupt. There basically is no in between. Entertaining!
Anyway, an element I’m not surprised by here is that Twitter’s board accepted the offer — I had assumed Musk would walk away, realizing before it was too late what a headache it would be to actually own Twitter. And I still think Microsoft should have stepped in for strategic reasons, but it felt like this offer had pushed Twitter down an acquisition path one way or another.
It’s bittersweet. I joined Twitter as a user over fifteen years ago and loved it from day one. I mean, my first tweets were awesome. As someone who used to be obsessed with AIM status messages, I totally got it.² And shortly thereafter, I started covering the service as a reporter. Later, well after it went public, and the stock fell from post-IPO highs of around $75/share to $25/share, below their IPO price, I bought some shares.³ Just as with Facebook and later Snapchat, it felt like the market didn’t get it.
Those Facebook and Snap bets were quite right. With Twitter… the market was perhaps more right than not. The stock entered this world around $45/share and now will exit it at $54/share. Sure, my own ~2x return is fine, but that’s over seven years. In the biggest bull market in history. I could have invested in HP and made a better return. HP!
The point is that if Twitter didn’t have what it took to convince investors to buy in during the past decade, it seemed unlikely they were ever going to. And with the market now in a state of turbulence, the board was eventually drawn towards Elon’s musk. His track record overcame his chaos. A chokehold started to feel like a warm embrace.
At the same time, Twitter has always been about far more than the business — which is probably a big part of the problem! It’s just an awesome product for people like myself. That is, information carnivores. And while they’ve bought a handful of products I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved with only to kill them, the core product has largely remained intact and great. The simplicity of what it is and does has endured countless assaults of cruft. And other general chaos. I mean, it survived Donald Trump.
Honestly, the relationship has felt a bit like that Adam Sandler song.
I’m not going to lie, there’s some real trepidation here as a user with this change. Mostly because it’s such a wildcard. They’re handing the reigns to their most influential user. Think about that for a second. It’s wild. The fact that he happens to be a Memelord with a penchant to enter “Goblin Mode” elevates that to insanity. It’s like a jester who becomes king — if that jester also happens to be the richest person in the kingdom and its most iconic businessman on the side. It’s as if his entire goal in this world is to actually make us believe we are living in a simulation. But one gone awry so we can tell something is off.
So what now? Who the hell knows! I’m still not convinced even Elon Musk does! An edit button? Yes! But that was already in progress. More user verification? I guess? Less advertising? Yes please! Open sourcing algorithms? Sure, but that sounds infinitely harder than it seems on the surface. Will Twitter decentralize? Lol.
I do believe Twitter will execute faster now. But that was already happening over the past couple of years. It just wasn’t fast enough to really move any needles that Wall Street wanted to see. Now Wall Street won’t have to see them! So that’s probably a good thing.
This is decidedly less a good thing for current Twitter employees. Regardless of what ends up happening, imagine trying to operate in this environment. I don’t think it has ever been particularly easy to be a Twitter employee, given everything described above, but this is a whole new level. And it slams headfirst into the ethos they have historically extolled so overtly in public, #OneTwitter and all that. That rallying cry must feel it morphed into a real cry today, regardless of the platitudes and praise co-founder Jack Dorsey is trying to layer on to the move. The fact of the matter is that Twitter should never have been in a position to be acquired by a single person. And while Dorsey can pass the bucks to the board and others, he’s to blame for the precarious state of the company as much as anyone. Obviously.
Regardless, Twitter’s employee base is going to look a lot different in the next year. As hard as that might be to hear for the current flock, there’s a world in which this is a good thing for the company. Regime changes naturally shake things up, and Twitter itself has had a number of those! But again, this feels like something quite a bit more fundamental. At least right now. This could very well be more of a ‘reset’ than a ‘shake up’. And it’s more than just hitting a button. This is taking the cartridge out of the Nintendo, blowing on it, and putting it back in. Does it work? Does the game look the same? Does the bird look the same post-molting? All new feathers. We’ll see…
Others in the public will be and are upset that fewer eyes on the company will mean bad things to come. And sure, maybe. Maybe even probably? But at this point in Twitter’s history it sadly isn’t really about such a debate— what other choice was there? Twitter as a public company was going nowhere, now as a private one backed by the world’s wealthiest person the sky is at least theoretically the limit again. Unless Tesla shares start to fall back down to Earth… Then again, things can, and have, gone the other way. Elon has a unique way of making it so. This is the ultimate “we’ll see…”
I’ll choose to end on the side of some optimism here. As I wrote last year in one of the countless posts I’ve written about Twitter over the years, this one on the topic of switching from an ad-based model:
But this is all much easier said than done, of course. Especially when a network wasn’t built from the ground-up to monetize this way. But in some bizarro way, Twitter’s messiness as a product over the past many years may actually help with this transition. Because Twitter is still very much a scaffolding built around a massive opportunity, there is a real chance for pretty fundamental changes to actually work. Get to work, Twitter.
I go back to Elon’s razor. Whatever happens to Twitter now, it will be entertaining. But that also depends on your perspective. As Elon’s next tweet in the chain rightly noted, “as seen from an external observer, not the participants”. He’s a participant now. Buckle up.
¹ Hat tip to Scott Belsky who recalled this morning just prior to the deal that Musk tweeted this in January of 2021. His third tweet in the sequence also noted that, “yes, and then Occam’s razor is actually third most likely”.
² And it all comes back around!
³ Shares which eventually dropped to $14/share.
