Just Elon Doing Elon Things

Well, well, well. Maybe Twitter ISN'T beyond saving after all. Elon Musk, Twitter enthusiast, is now the largest shareholder of Twitter stock. What does it mean?

Twitter is beyond saving.

That was me almost exactly a month ago when lamenting how disappointing GETTR has been after a very brief pop in interest in early January. That challenge has apparently been accepted by Elon Musk. Musk just took a 9.2% stake in the company through his trust. Elon is now the largest shareholder of Twitter. What makes this development so interesting is how openly opposed to Twitter’s platform policies Musk has been. Just over a week ago he polled his 80 million followers about Twitter’s role in speech freedom.

Unsurprisingly, 70% of the 2 million poll voters said Twitter is not doing a good job on speech freedom. He followed up his original poll tweet with “the consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” Now, roughly a week later, he’s the largest single shareholder of Twitter stock. You can’t make this stuff up.

This seemingly sets up Musk for an activist investor strategy through Twitter rather than building his own platform from scratch - something that he alluded to right around the time of his poll. Given how difficult building and growing a viable Twitter alternative obviously is, this step is incredibly interesting in my view.

Gab is out there, I will admit I have not used it. But I’ve heard it is decent. Parler has a history and name recognition but has failed to really capture the opportunity. The Trump-backed Truth Social has been accused of improperly using Mastodon’s source code and has reportedly already lost two key executives after a brutal February launch. That seems destined to fail. GETTR, I don’t even know where to begin. Despite saying I’d keep it last month, I deleted my account recently for a multitude of reasons. Flote, which is my personal favorite alternative, is going through some serious growing pains after relaunching post-beta. Building the alternative is proving incredibly difficult, it would seem.

The problems for those who are trying to build a viable alternative to Twitter are obvious. Getting funding is probably hard. Getting upper echelon developers is probably hard. Getting Twitter’s user base to convert is probably hard. Then, if all of that goes your way, you still have to battle gatekeepers like Google and Apple who control your apps’ presence in their app stores. So for normal entrepreneurs, building a proper alternative is a huge undertaking. Which is why we don’t have one with any kind of network adoption to this point. What can be done?

Well, if you’re the richest person on the planet, you can just start buying the problem child and fix it from within. It’s a hell of an approach if he can pull it off. I don’t know what to make of Elon. I’ll state that clearly. Is he a living version of Tony Stark or is he this generation’s greatest conman? I don’t know. But I’ll be watching how this Twitter/Musk saga unfolds from the sidelines and hoping for the best. That doesn’t mean @faybomb on Twitter is coming back anytime soon. But I’m watching.