Twitter isn't Tesla or SpaceX

Musk's success was based on building on and improving industries with proven business models. But, Twitter is a media company...

CREDIT: Rosaura Ochoa - Creative Commons (Altered)

Ah, the tech bro Elon Musk love fest continues unabated. It's weird to watch grown men — the fandom, unsurprisingly, largely tilts male — beating their breasts and clutching their pearls as the oft-saluted market forces take out the new drywall on Musk's recent Twitter renovations.

What's weird is they don't just appear to be egging on his behavior, they make astonishingly strange assertions, like this post which appeared on LinkedIn recently comparing Musk's takeover of Twitter to Steve Jobs' legendary return to Apple.

Apple? Meet orange. Unlike Apple, Twitter has absolutely zero products consumers are willing to pay for. Even before Jobs' return, Apple had multiple revenue streams and services, what it didn't have was market share. At the time, Microsoft was the laptop and desktop behemoth entering into cloud services.

Musk may understand auto manufacturing and rocket science, but, let's be honest, dozens of companies had lengthy histories in creating the systems he needed and used and often replicated or improved upon with Tesla and SpaceX.

What Musk doesn't understand is the media.

He understands how to manipulate the media, sure, but what he doesn't understand is that Twitter is suffering from the same issues facing both legacy media and digital-first properties: advertising-supported revenue.

Twitter is just a content vehicle that relies on original or curated third-party content. And now he is attempting two of the oldest "new media" tricks in the book, the subscription model and revenue sharing.

His excuse that "activists" are the problem ignores the larger issue: advertisers don't want their products aligned with questionable content. He and his new-found right-wing compadres can complain all they want about "cancel culture", but most corporations don't want their paid tweets appearing above or below a racist one.

Everyone who follows media, and specifically the Big Tech social media giants, knew Twitter was overvalued. Even before Musk announced his intent to buy it, Scott Galloway wrote about how poorly it was run, and how overvalued it was in 2021. Musk opted out of due diligence and then tried to use the court of public opinion to bully the now-former Twitter board into lowering the price. That failed. He was most likely forced by his legal team and advisors to close the deal.

He fired people and is now rehiring a number of them because he fired some of the wrong people, apparently. Even now, Musk’s supporters keep parroting a variation of, "Twitter’s ad revenue is disastrous and the company was over-employed." A post-purchase mantra born of the idea that, as if on the day Musk walked into Twitter’s HQ with the kitchen sink, he made some amazing discoveries by the virtue of his genius.

It’s fitting that over the same few weeks, we’ve also seen Twitter’s longtime rival, Facebook, and its parent company, Meta, lose extraordinary value and market share, literally to the tune of more than US$211 billion. For more than a decade, both Twitter and Facebook — and to a greater extent, Google, Craigslist, and Amazon — siphoned off revenue based on content created by traditional news, film, and TV companies without barely any legitimate compensation.

Both Australia and the European Union have begun to take regulatory steps to protect citizens’ privacy, as well as the autonomy and economic viability of media organizations. Faced with these headwinds, it’s possible Musk may take the time to stop having petty arguments with the likes of Kathy Griffin and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and solve Twitter’s revenue problem, thereby creating and offering greater revenue solutions for the overall news and media world overall.

Now, that would be genius.