Obligatory Post On Twitter And Elon Musk

It’s all Elon all the time.

It seems the tech world can’t get enough of this story and everyone’s got an opinion.

My opinion can be summarized simply as ‘neutral’. No predictions – just a wait and see attitude.

I know, boring, right?

But there’s a reason for it.

On the one hand, you have Elon who is CEO and the driving force behind FOUR multibillion dollar companies:

  • Tesla
  • SpaceX
  • Boring
  • Neuralink

And, this is after he had a spectacular run and exit with Paypal.

Most smart people get lucky once. Elon has done so three times with Tesla, SpaceX and Paypal – with Boring and Neuralink just getting started but already having multibillion dollar valuations.

Do you really want to bet against this kind of a track record?

Downside?

On the other hand, he’s now taking on a much more controversial play with Twitter in a very very mature and fickle market.

Whether it’s monetization schemes or too little content moderation, it’s easy to drive away a good chunk of the 300 million or so Twitter users. At the same time, the loosened content moderation scheme might attract a good chunk of new users.

So maybe he ends up with a wash in terms of number of users after a year.

The problem with that is the 44 Billion dollar price tag – it assumes user and revenue growth. With user churn keeping the user count constant and loosened content moderation schemes that will drive away advertisers, there’s no real revenue growth to be had.

So the argument could be made that Elon bought a depreciating asset.

Still, do you really want to bet against him given his track record?

Sure, everyone makes mistakes and this could be a huge one for him. Not sure I want to bet against him though.

Hence, my neutral stance. For now.

PS: That doesn’t mean he isn’t an A$$. It seems an unfortunate cruel Darwinian twist that, throughout history, people who dream big and do big things are also big a$$holes – probably because they all just live in a world inside their head where perceptions are vastly different from the rest of us.