In an essay a decade ago, Peter Thiel, co-founder and venture capitalist of PayPal, argued provocatively that the technology industry let people down. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” he said in deflecting the world’s obsession with Twitter. Over the past few decades, Elon Musk has become the epitome of a visionary tech titan, a living four-letter rebuttal to the Thiel critique. Musk has built many innovative businesses. First he helped create PayPal, which he sold to eBay in 2002, making $100 million. Then, with Tesla, which he debuted as a first-round investor in 2004, he made green sexy by combining flashy automobile styling with long-lasting batteries to revolutionize electric cars. He created the rocket company Space X, which was valued at $100 billion last year. At both Tesla and Space X, they have built a futuristic edge. The Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., is located on the site of a former General Motors-Toyota plant, but is league ahead.
Thus Musk is more of an industrialist in the Henry Ford mold of Steve Jobs than a typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. But Musk’s successful bid for Twitter now also casts him as a kind of Henry Luce. Nearly 100 years ago, Loos founded Time magazine and then Fortune a few years later, and built a media empire that introduced people to the minds of political leaders and CEOs, just as Twitter does better today. Now the question is whether Musk’s attempt to keep his car and rocket companies running as well as the financially faltering platform under heavy scrutiny (given its more than 200 million global user base) is a kind of royal redundancy. represents. This challenge can outweigh even the richest man in the world. The stock market reaction was swift: Tesla shares fell 12% on Tuesday, though it was likely driven by the fact that Musk may have to sell billions of dollars worth of Tesla shares to fund his $44 billion buyout.
Unusually for someone in the middle of an acquisition battle, Musk took to the public forum of a TED event in Vancouver two weeks ago and outlined his plans for Twitter. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the headlines from his Twitter bid, it wasn’t the thoughtful Musk who appeared in a TED talk five years ago. Instead, he seemed like a McKinsey advisor to Mother Teresa’s humanism. “Civilization risk is reduced… the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform” and the more grand is “Twitter is the digital town square where matters important to the future of humanity are debated” Flows like a flood. To be fair, as his biographer Ashley Vance observes, Musk often sounds like he’s been crafting mission statements since he was 14 because he’s spoken in such grand voices. Still, there was little evidence of Musk’s unabashed wit and sparkly wit, which earned him more than 80 million followers on Twitter.
Musk said he would make Twitter’s algorithms “open source” to make decisions about what to highlight and what to remove more transparent, and promised to weed out spam bots. He said he would introduce an edit button, which Twitter is working on. It had no idea how it would replace Twitter, which has lost nearly $850 million in nine years as a public company. In a rare degree not seen on the platform, almost everyone agrees that Twitter should make more money through avenues such as the subscription model, but also through more focused advertising. It lags behind Facebook, Instagram and YouTube in earning eye-catching earnings, but Musk has almost nothing to say about the challenge.
John Thornhill, innovation editor for The Financial Times, pointed to a central paradox as Musk made his bid for Twitter: “The worrying assumption is that Musk appears largely disinterested in the area in which he helps Twitter the most.” (rethinking its business model) and is primarily interested in an area where it may harm (eliminating content moderation).”
The risk isn’t just that a billionaire who calls himself a “free speech absolutist” could control such an important media platform in a world poisoned by hate speech and polarization. After former Facebook employee Frances Haugen’s allegations last year that Facebook’s own research has revealed how the platform fuels hate, misinformation and political upheaval, it’s hard to see how Musk can attribute that responsibility to Mark Zuckerberg. We can overcome what social media platforms must take (but regularly run into) in our ever more dysfunctional and dystopian world. Arguably, Twitter is a rich world problem. In India, it has very few users as compared to WhatsApp. But what is tweeted still has the widest potential reach, as it is available to everyone with Internet access.
It is very difficult to stop the spread of propaganda on WhatsApp, given that it hosts closed-door chats with encrypted messages. There is also a problem that Musk, a ‘free-speech absolutist’, has been dubbed President Xi Jinping’s “favourite capitalist” and has huge investments in China. It has already come under the microscope, with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos wondering loudly and publicly whether Beijing may have “gained an advantage” on Twitter.
By gaining control of Twitter without a clearly delineated strategy, Elon Musk distracts from selling excellent cars and launching innovative rockets. This could tarnish his reputation as one of the greatest business visionaries of the 21st century.
Rahul Jacob is a Mint columnist and a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times.