Last week I published a piece – on Substack and Medium – titled “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Twitter to X” which, due to that bizarre alchemy of the internet, has, somehow, been read more than 22,000 times.
As so often happens, since I published the piece I’ve kept thinking about the issues that catalysed the writing in the first place, and, consequently, my analysis of them has evolved. Last week I speculated about what Elon Musk was up to with the X transition, and hypothesised, ultimately, that the brand development was a clumsy placeholder for his long term ambition of bringing Twitter’s digital domain under the aesthetic umbrella of is Tesla and SpaceX brands. I thought it was something he’d maybe row back on, at least partially. But several days on, the X looks increasingly likely to stay: Twitter’s main corporate handle is now @X, they erected (and then dismantled) a giant X on the top of their HQ, the logo on the app has been switched from birdie to X, and, crucially, people have started referring to the service as X. I noted – with alarm – that Pivot, the tech podcast hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, talked about their X account in the deadpan opening a week ago, while Politico’s London Playbook this morning made reference to a drama “taking place on X”.
So let’s imagine that the service is here to stay and that Twitter, that ol’ bird, is dead as the dodo. Then we start to enter the realm of Occam’s razor. His razor, that the simplest answer is almost always the correct one, holds up a lot. In other words: if you hear the sound of hooves, think “horse” not “zebra”.
The horse answer here is that Elon Musk, after years at the grind, earning hundreds of billions of dollars, fathering 10 children and having at least 3 divorces, is just behaving a bit… nuts. After all, Musk would hardly be the first billionaire to go off the psychological deep end. Think about Howard Hughes, locked up in a room with bottles of his own urine, or Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, fundraising for a Swedish fascist group. Simultaneously running three major global companies – Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter – is not something that many therapists would recommend. And this horse solution answers everything. You’re not mad, it says, his decision making is seriously impaired. He’s behaving erratically, narcissistically and against logical self-interest. He’s doing it because his obsession with wealth and fame, both dangerous pursuits in themselves, has warped his mind. So everything about X makes sense: it’s just a bad idea.
I’m more interested in the donkey solution (i.e. maybe less plausible than a horse but altogether more convincing than a zebra). The donkey solution, as far as I’m concerned, is that Musk doesn’t really care if he kills Twitter. Instead of assuming that he’s doing a bad job of trying to run Twitter, assume that he’s barely trying to run Twitter at all. Because Musk is doing extremely well in all his other business ventures. He’s reshaping the space economy, a huge potential growth area, and could easily make hundreds of billions of dollars more from that in the coming years. Tesla has had its difficulties, but not out of sync with the global EV industry, and he has a huge early adopter bias there. He is, by some predictions, on track to become earth’s first trillionaire. And so maybe Twitter is just a lavish, silly exercise in self-promotion. A confidence trick. Because if you can burn $44bn dollars then you must be doing well.
And remember that Tesla and SpaceX don’t advertise. They don’t spend the billions of dollars on TV and print and billboard campaigns that their competitors do. Their whole business is predicated on the name recognition of the brands and their founder. If Twitter, and its decline, ends up being just a massive Times Square advert for their services, then so be it. Every time someone talks about Musk, they remind customers that he exists. Almost every news story about Musk refers to both Tesla and SpaceX. The market penetration of those brands is as high as any of their competitors. And maybe $44bn is the price you pay for that.
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop… if that is the sound of an approaching donkey, rather than a horse or zebra, then X is a nihilistic punt. Twitter becomes “the Elon Musk social network”, just as Tesla is “the Elon Musk car”, StarLink is “the Elon Musk internet” and SpaceX is “the Elon Musk satellite company”. When you’re the richest man in the world, and only getting richer, maybe there’s a perverse pleasure in buying something so expensive and then not having to worry, at all, whether it implodes.
Below the line! RED HOT thoughts on why Barbie and Oppenheimer suck and we should end cinema’s over-reliance on the “event movie”. Please consider upgrading your subscription, because I need to feed my dog (he’s hungry).
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