Musk Wins

He Buys Twitter

The Twitter board came to its senses. They put shareholder return over their own personal woke ideology. The threat of shareholder lawsuits and the repercussions of such suits will jostle one out of one’s woke slumber.

It’s easy to Tweet woke and manage woke when there isn’t a cost.

One thing I thought of about Musk and wealthy people is this, they all seem to want to own newspapers or some sort of media company.

Warren Buffett owns newspapers. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Rupert Murdoch built his fortune in media and continues to own lots of media companies.

Twitter is the ultimate media company. Musk will own it. It will be interesting to see the board he puts together, and the management team he installs to build and unlock value.

Imagine, the NYT and WaPo paying some sort of fee to use Twitter to spread their misinformation. If you are a news organization and tweet links all day long that have paywalls behind them, would you do it the same way if you had to pay to spread the information? Imagine a smug individual having to pay for their “blue check”!

I love watching liberals meltdown at the thought of having to compete in the open marketplace of ideas. When those ideas compete on a level playing field, they usually lose.

At the same time, conservatives shouldn’t be so happy. If you think tyrants like Louis Farrakhan will be banned from Twitter, they probably won’t be. Free speech is free speech.

There are no hard and fast consequences for the abuse of free speech. There is no panel of experts that metes out justice for violations of free speech. But, if you truly believe in free speech you will have to be tolerant of a lot of stuff you don’t like, and everyone who exercises their right to free speech will have to accept personal responsibility for it.

Added:

I noticed Washington Post and Chicago Booth MBA Megan McArdle tweeted that she doesn’t think this is a good buy for Elon Musk financially. I see a lot of hand wringing on the left. McArdle always positioned herself as libertarian but her opinions and writing over the past several years show a leftward path. I don’t know if Bezos and WaPo employ any true conservative columnists anymore. They aren’t interested in that.

Here is the start of the thread.

Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo

The first thing to point out is that this deal makes no financial sense for Elon Musk. He's paying a premium for the stock, the total value of the acquisition is almost a fifth of his net worth, and there's no obvious way he's going to squeeze more money out of Twitter operations

Here is a link to her column, which is behind a paywall. Sort of ironic when you think about it.

My response is that the hardest thing for Musk to do after the acquisition will be to retain key employees. He doesn’t need to retain the entire workforce. He will also attract employees that buy into his vision once it is articulated.

If people have the opportunity to work for someone like Musk and have a chance at building something interesting, and getting a nice outsize gain for themselves in the process, plenty of very qualified people will jump at the chance.

Just moving the Twitter HQ to another state will save millions in rent, property taxes, and employee taxes. How about a potential Miami HQ where a lot of seminal stuff in cryptocurrency is going down?

The other thing that McArdle is missing is growing topline revenue. Twitter is an ad model. It derives revenue from running ads.

• What if that model were tweaked?

• What if he found new streams of revenue?

• What if he started charging the left wing publications that dominate Twitter a penny per clickthrough to put links to articles behind paywalls on the platform?

• What if he started charging reporters and famous people to have their precious blue checks? It takes resources to research them, shouldn’t they pay for that if they want to enjoy blue check privilege?

• What if Twitter’s code became open sourced? How does that change the model?

• What if he were able to tokenize and turn Twitter into a Web 3.0 blockchain company'?

It’s clear that the current management of Twitter has done nothing for shareholder value. It’s also clear that the current management of Twitter discriminates strongly against conservatives which is why you have competing platforms that are basically conservative echo chambers and don’t have the reach, breadth, or dominance of Twitter. If the lefties want to build left-wing Twitter, have at it but they will run into the same problem that conservatives did.

Doing nothing and bringing Trump back onto the platform will have a positive effect on valuation assuming he tweets with the proliferation and provocation he used to.

I am happy to let Elon decide what he wants to do with the money he has earned. If he wants to spend a bunch of it on Twitter and take a shot at building a different kind of business that creates value then let’s watch and see what happens. When you have built several multibillion-dollar businesses, you deserve the respect of the market and opinion leaders to see what might happen.

Visionaries like Musk don’t pay a lot of attention to the chattering class. They don’t follow their rules. You can’t be a visionary and follow the rules of games set forth by people who have no interest in breaking rules.