Elon Musk, as he is about to take the reins of Twitter, has blustered about how the platform “has become kind of the de-facto town square,” and that it’s “really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”
The Tesla oligarch has also positioned himself around the non sequitur that “I don’t care about the economics at all,” even as he’s had to secure financing for the leveraged buyout that would ostensibly have required him to detail his plans for return on the sizable investment.
You may already see the inconsistencies inherent in putting the supposed motivation for Musk to control Twitter, that he wants to position himself as protecting the “de-facto town square” that he says Twitter has become, with the reality of committing $44 billion of mostly other people’s money toward that goal.
Think about going down to whatever your nearest town square is, venturing toward the periphery, braving your way toward the center, and making whatever point you want to make about, say, whatever your local government is up to these days, about Congress, the war in Ukraine, the top 15 funny tweets from husbands about marriage, the bad call at the end of last night’s game, whatever.
Who makes money off that?
As you let your realization sink in, it becomes clear that Musk isn’t committing $44 billion of mostly other people’s money to protecting the “de-facto town square.”
For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Tesla is valued the way it is on Wall Street, except that Musk has convinced a lot of people who should know better that he’s ahead of the curve on electric cars, and maybe he is.
I’m not buying that he is, literally; I don’t own any Tesla stock, not that I’m rooting against him or whoever else might end up doing it better.
I can’t figure out, either, why Twitter is worth anything close to $44 billion. As an advertising platform, it’s junk, and maybe Musk, an engineer at heart, thinks he can figure out how to improve upon the model to make it profitable, and if he can, good on him.
But therein lies the disconnect. Musk is selling himself as the Twitter messiah, the living, breathing avatar of free speech, intent on preserving the town square, your right to free speech and the rest, when in reality, if he was to treat his pending-regulatory-approval new toy as an actual town square, he’d strip it of all the parts that involve it making money.
The algorithms that amplify messages would be done away with. Think about your nearby town square. Some guy might bellow with a little more volume than the others, but not enough that the people in the next town, or continent, can’t help to hear.
The advertising, also gone. See above. No algorithms, no amplified messages, so advertisers have to compete for attention without artificial boosting the way everybody else does.
I’m not suggesting that Musk should strip Twitter of its money-making capacity to turn it into the de-facto town square that he claims to envision it being.
I am suggesting that he’s trying to sell something that isn’t what he’s making it out to be.
The banks aren’t going all-in on a $44 billion Elon Musk civics project.
The gamble is that the engineer can make Twitter more efficient for the amplification of select messages.
If it means more power for oligarchs like Musk, well, he at least seems like a halfway approachable oligarch.
Story by Chris Graham
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