Will Twitter Become Litter?
Is Elon Musk Able to Control Elon Musk?
Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, inaugurated his media venture by immediately firing lots of grownups and then rushing to retweet, to his 112,000,000 followers, an unfounded story — that Paul Pelosi, House Speaker Pelosi’s husband was attacked by a male prostitute who Mr. Pelosi had picked up at a bar.
The suggestion was another concoction of our country’s plethora of hatemongers.
Twenty-eight thousand retreats and 100,000 likes later, Musk deleted his retweet. I.e., he fed his co-conspiracy theorists their daily allotment of red meat and then tried to hide his indecency, not to mention homophobia.
One of the fired execs surely tweeted, “Elon, Keep it up. A few more of these and Twitter will be Litter.”
Twitter has 206 million users, mostly foreign. But the company is losing its most active and, therefore, most lucrative clients. Elon, though, has a plan for success — lay off three-quarters of Twitter’s employees. My question. Why stop there? Why not lay off 100 percent?
Yet, the real risk to Musk’s new venture is not operational. Indeed, the three-quarters layoffs just dropped to one quarter. The real risk is Musk, himself. Twitter has 76 million U.S. users. Let’s suppose that half were, as they should be, deeply offended by Musk’s retweet. They may start looking for another quick-messaging platform.
Networks aren’t inviolable. Take Meta/Facebook. It’s starting to lose users even without intentionally upsetting a large share of its customers. Its stock has lost two-thirds of its value over the past year. As for Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, his net worth has declined from $140 billion to $38 billion!
How might Zuckerberg recover? One option would be to launch Splitter as a competitor to Twitter. Splitter, as in Split from Musk, could be built overnight. As we’ve seen with Trump’s new network, Truth Social, the technology of tweeting is easy to replicate. What’s hard is building a network. Truth Social has only 513,000 users — miles below its projected 70 million.
And once established, social networks are very sticky. If you’re interacting with 50 friends on network A, each of whom has their own 50 friends on A, each of them has their own 50 friends on A, each of …, well good luck getting your 50 buddies to join you in moving to network B. They will need to get all their buddies, who will need to get all their buddies, who will need to get all … to move to A.
Still, Zuckerberg’s very slowly fading network is 10 to 15 times the size of Musk’s. And were Mark to actively advertise, including monetarily incentivize, his followers to abandon Twitter, en mass, and switch to Splitter, Elon’s media empire could fail as dramatically as Trump’s.
Facebook, now Meta, is no paragon of internet virtue. Still, Zuckerberg has kept his politics separate from his business. And he’s a grownup who understands you don’t denigrate someone who has just been physically attacked and is recovering in a hospital bed.
Hence, Mark’s in a position to engineer a mass exodus to Splitter. And Mark’s hardly the only billionaire who could eat Elon’s lunch. Our country has 720 billionaires. Many are multi-billionaires. Jeff Bezos, for example, has 168 one billion-dollar bills. Could he pay 206 million people $10 each to join Splitter? In a heartbeat. Plus, he has his own vast network, Amazon, to whom to convey the offer.
The bottom line? Elon Musk is a brilliant, innovative person who has done incredible things for our country and the world. But his success with Twitter and his other ventures will largely depend on one thing — growing up.
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Your comments bring two thoughts to mind. One, Musk would really like to become president; fortunately, he wasn't born in this country.
Two, I can't help thinking that we are reliving the period of the robber barons when such entities as inter-locking directorates and monopolistic companies became the norm in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries. Musk and a few others seem bent on taking control of far too many companies (media and otherwise). Where is a Teddy Roosevelt to combat such actions?
Love your financial acumen but hate your politics. Think you would do well to stick what you're good at and leave political opinions to those in the know!