Elon Musk is His Own Asset

Before I start, I want to make it clear that my position on Twitter is not: “Ugh, why would anyone use that? It’s dumb, everyone should just leave now.” Not only do I try to avoid statements that make me sound older than cars, I understand that Twitter is very important to a lot of people for a number of reasons. I used it a lot at one point and only quit a few months ago because some stuff gets boring. Also, it was a period of several user experience changes that were – to me – annoying as fuck.

Anyway, over at The Verge Nilay Patel kindly explained to Lemon Usk what exactly it is that he has purchased, in words he just might be able to understand. Y’all ready for this lede?

You fucked up real good, kiddo.

Maybe you were ready, I was not, even though the headline is Welcome to Hell, Elon.

But that was just a rhetorical cracking of knuckles and rolling up of sleeves.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

Wheee.

Quick aside, guess Twitter’s current position in the social media Top 10, as measured by monthly users?

Trick question.

Now, back to the flaying.

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

But. That would mean his decision to purchase Twitter did not come from the cool, calm, rational brain of a consummate super genius businesshuman. Gasp.

And if “You just bought yourself” isn’t a euphemism for jerking off in public, it should be.

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Surely there can be no financial or social downside to promising the worst people in the world they can say whatever they want! Right?

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

Patel also discusses another problem Musk faces – the vast majority of human beings don’t want to hang out with creepy right wing fan boys.

Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) 

And despite the wishes of the valiant free speech warthogs of Substack, there’s no way to make normal people hang out with, listen to and otherwise validate creepy right wing fan boys. Yet. Which means bye-bye any advertisers that aren’t selling survivalist kit that dissolves in rain water, dick enlargement pills that totally will work this time, unlike every other time, alarmingly cheap firearms and other products aimed at the crwfb crowd.

But wait, there’s more. Turns out there’s a bit more to defending free speech than shit-posting or spending lots of money.

You can’t deploy AI at this problem: you have to go out and defend the actual First Amendment against the bad laws in Texas and Florida, whose taxes you like and whose governors you seem pretty fond of. Are you ready for what that looks like?

He is not.

And it gets worse the second you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to flout Germany’s speech laws? I would bet not. The Indian government basically demands social media companies provide potential hostages in order to operate in that country; you can’t engineer your way out of that shit.

Dud can’t engineer things he says he can engineer. He’s not ready.

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience.

Melon is of course free to do what obnoxious rich people do when the heat is on: Chicken out and throw employees – however many there are left – to his rabid fans. But that means having the sort of employees who are so desperate for employment that they’ll put up with that shit, and much, much worse, admitting he isn’t the all powerful defender of free speech (for the crwfb crowd).

And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.

Prediction: Not well.

Of course, Musk could make Twitter into his own private temple where the crwfb worship his greatness while tweeting gross memes and insulting each other. But he won’t make any money off it, Twitter will go the way of every other company that lost too many customers and too much revenue and something else will replace it. Or he can conquer his Twitter habit and his ego and … never mind. That will never happen.

People who post off-topic comments are the creepiest of Elon Musk’s right wing fans.