Big Technology Podcast - Twitter's Elon Musk Era Begins — With Christopher Mims

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

Christopher Mims is a tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss Elon Musk's ascent to Twitter's board this week and purchase of 9.2% of the company's shares. Join us for a deep conversation about what Elon might be up to, how much power he'll have, how Twitter employees are responding, and where this likey leads.

LinkedIn Presents Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Elon Musk has a now has a 9% stake in Twitter, And he's also joined the board as of yesterday. And this is a pretty big story, major story, something that Twitter's been buzzing about. And I think you're going to hear a lot about as we start moving forward into the Elon era of Twitter. I can't believe I actually just said that.

Well, our guest today to discuss it is none other than Chris Mims. He's a technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal and also the author of arriving today from factory to front door by everything has changed about how and what we buy it's a great book you should go pick it up chris welcome to the show yeah thank you for having me i'm very excited to talk about this topic this is going to be a fun one um there's so much to talk about what was your reaction when you heard that elan was first buying into twitter and then joining the board i was baffled um but that's because twitter's uh algorithm has not been showing me elon's tweets lately despite my keen interest in them so hopefully that's one of the things he will improve first as a number who yeah it'll be like when the youtube album showed up in

everybody's uh iTunes catalog like Elon's tweets will just automatically appear at the top of your algorithmic feed every time you log in is I'm sure the first change he's going to make that's right yeah I mean the second reaction was that I actually went and looked at some of his older tweets and I feel like those are just incredibly revealing about kind of what his interests are and like you know I now have a comprehensive theory of um you like Elon's worldview on this that I'm ready to vomit out for your listeners. I would love to hear yours, though. So I think between the two of us,

we can get a pretty comprehensive model of what's going on here. What was your reaction, Alex? I mean, it was, I was, I don't want to say I predicted this because I didn't, but it made it total sense to me. And it was something that I first thought, well, why didn't this happen earlier?

I think Elon loves to mess with internet culture. I think he has some strong ideas about what Twitter should be and Twitter is the source of internet culture. And so for him to use part of his wealth to buy into Twitter and try to shape internet culture in the platform that he's most active in a place that he's used to manipulate markets and drive Tesla stack, you know, it makes a lot of sense that he would want to get in on that. I do think that there's some merit to what he's talking about with the content moderation stuff where he wants to have less content moderation and more quote unquote free speech.

We can get into that. I'm sure we will. But to me, that was it. And I think you pointed out a little bit yesterday, how Elon likes to get involved in things he really cares about. And his companies to date have been about changing the world. Like PayPal, for instance, was about attacking the global financial system. Tesla is all about introducing electronic cars and pushing electric vehicles forward, not only with his company, by getting other companies to be involved. SpaceX is about being a multi-planetary species. and, you know, of course, making money from the government of military contracts on the way. And as you pointed out, the boring company was because he was mad about traffic. So this just does seem to fit the pattern. But enough of my perspective, you know, I'm curious what you've gleaned, given your research. Yeah, I mean, he, Reuters actually, of all outlets, did a great roundup of his most relevant tweets. I mean, it's pretty clear. I mean, he has said things like, I can't believe the new CEO, I'm not quoting here, but paraphrasing.

I can't believe the new CEO of Twitter is, you know, prioritizing like NFT avatars, you know, whenever you think that you tweet about crypto is full of bots. He has said things like, shouldn't we all, should Twitter's algorithm be open source? And I think that, you know, we cannot ignore the fact that like, you know, he has more than a passing connection with Twitter's former CEO, Jack. And Jack recently tweeted, you know, I feel like the internet has really centralized control, you know, of communication, and I feel partly responsible for that. So I think if you look at the sum of kind of that chatter and what Elon has been tweeting, there's this feeling that, you know, look, they're both anti-Web3. They think that's mostly a sham. But they also,

it's almost like Marxism, right? Like, they agree with the web. three critique of the current internet, so-called web two, which is that it's too centralized. A few companies have too much power over speech and flows of money and advertising and everything else. But I think that they're, you know, look, they're older guys. They're a bit reactionary at this point. It happens to all of us. And they don't see Web3 as a future. And I think that there have been models of what Twitter could be in the past. Like, what if everybody could just build their own Twitter client and curate their feed any way that they want. And that's entirely compatible with his so-called free speech absolutism.

People asked him to block Russian news sites on the Star Links that were like going to Ukraine or elsewhere. And he's like, nope, sorry, I'm a free speech absolutist. I mean, look, these are all old ideas, right? Like, this is all like Web 1.0 notions. And I think that he wants to move us back toward that world. and he thinks that Twitter is kind of mismanaged. He doesn't have faith in the new CEO.

And he thinks Web3 is a waste of time. And yet Twitter is focusing on Web 3. I mean, I have a very personal connection to this story in that I wrote a story based on conversations I had with Jack's communications people about, you know, Jack Dorsey and kind of the rise of Web 3. And he got real mad. And, you know, he tweeted like, oh, the journal just, you know,

needs a face to put on this kind of stuff. But it was the first moment at which it became apparent that he was this Bitcoin maximalist, but very anti-Web3, thinks it's just another tool of capitalist oppressors, i.e. venture capitalists. And there was this huge schism. And it led to this very public Twitter fight between him and I think Mark Andreessen or other VCs. And now Elon has chosen aside.

And he is in the, if not the Bitcoin Maxi corner, the anti-Webohenobes. the anti-Web-3 corner, and that definitely informs how he wants to, I think, change Twitter, although I think eventually when he reinstates Trump or whatever, that's going to be the headline. Okay, so yeah, we'll get to the Trump thing in a bit, but there's a lot to unpack with what you just said. So I think I want to get a little bit definitional here and talk a little bit about what it would mean for Jack to support Web3 versus Bitcoin, because it does require a little bit of nuance. And then how does Twitter's distributed product fit into that? So, you know, I find it interesting that Elon, I'll start with this.

I find it interesting that Elon is coming in and pushing for more free speech. And if you're right, then he's going to push for a more distributed Twitter. When Twitter is actually on the way to creating a distributed Twitter, where, you know, there isn't one Twitter but multiple Twitters and you could join the Twitter that, you know, block certain users or doesn't block certain users and basically choose your own adventure, which is something that they are actively working on. So that's a product in development. So if Elon is unhappy with the direction of Twitter

and wants to move more towards that, isn't that kind of weird because they are doing that is that they're moving too slow? And then, you know, a follow-up to that is, you know, Web3 is all about building distributed programs, you know, on the blockchain that sound a lot like that distributed version of Twitter. So how does that differ from Web3? I mean, I think the main issue that a lot of technologists have with Web 3 is that, well, I mean, it's multi-layered.

Chris, can you define Web 3 also? Yeah, so what is Web 3? I mean, as far as I can tell, it's anything where you pour some blockchain sauce on it. But to be more charitable, you know, Web 3 is really a youth movement. We can't ignore that. It's a lot of very young developers and excitable, you know, frankly teenagers in some case on various discords who are like, hey, we can use the blockchain. You know, maybe it's Ethereum, maybe it's not to create new kinds of companies, you know, which they call Dow's. Like we can use it to, you know, value art or create new categories of investable assets and those are NFTs.

you know, we can use it to kind of turn money into software, and that's Ethereum and do smart contracts and all this other stuff. So Web 3, though, the idea is like, let's completely rebuild the existing internet using the blockchain, which automatically is a distributed infrastructure in some ways. And it's a very kind of utopian vision of what that could look like. it is being pushed really heavily by certain VCs, particularly in Dresen Horwitz, and now it's alumni. And so Jack has said one of his specific objections, because he's kind of anti-venture capitalists in general, is this is getting pushed by VCs. They just want to control whatever comes next. It's not actually going to be decentralized or democratized. Fair argument.

And there's also a lot of objections, which I think are pretty fair, that like just from a technical perspective, a lot of its claims just don't work. Right. So then take us back to the Twitter situation here. So how does that apply in this argument? Well, I mean, in some ways, it's just kind of an ideological battle that puts Musk and Jack on the same side of history, as it were, where they're like, you know, Twitter's nods toward Web 3 are kind of a waste of time. And what we really need is to truly figure out, you know, for Jack, you know, distributed means of ownership and communication for Elon, you know, maybe that, but as much about free speech. And that's kind of where their interests intersect. I mean, I think part of this is Elon,

you know, like so many before him, anybody who uses Twitter for or is as addicted to it as he clearly is developed some very particular ideas about how the service could be improved. And so Twitter has always been slow to rollout changes. They have told me, you know, that is because they, they're really, they're really test driven. They'll run big tests of various new ideas, see how it affects user behavior and performance. But, you know, frankly, that is not, that's not how you create the next, you know, Tesla or whatever. Like, like, Elon is a very different person. Like, he, he gets an idea about what people might want. He's often right, and he just kind of manifests it.

That's a completely different way to run a company. And I think he probably perceives maybe rightly that if he joins the board and influences their direction, you know, it could be, you know, a better and more interesting place. In terms of his like personal involvement, I mean, the guy has a very short attention span, right? Like, let's not forget that he was like personally designing a rescue system for those. boy is trapped in a cave. So, you know, this is the next shiny object for Elon. Right. And so I want to go back to the fact that Twitter has been building something like this.

So can you just share your thoughts about what it means? You know, do you think that he's going to actually just, you know, for Elon, if he's actually focused on speech, do you think that he's going to be pushing forward this idea that, you know, Twitter should be distributed? That's something that's on the roadmap, which again, I wonder why he needs. needs to join Twitter if that's something that's join the board and invest in it, if that's something that the company is actively working on. Or do you think it's him actually going to the main Twitter, Twitter.com, and actually causing changes in the way that they moderate content?

Or is there something else that I'm overlooking that, like, he might want to do in terms with the product that just hasn't happened yet? I mean, it's hard to speculate. He did run a Twitter poll saying, you know, do you think that Twitter, you know, respects or protects free speech? it's hard not to I think we can't ignore the subtext here of

Elon's shit posting and there just is no other word for it without spending 15 minutes describing the various memes that he has posted a lot of them are him expressing this kind of resentment of what I think he perceives

as what in another era we might call like the political correctness of Twitter or something I mean who knows how much of this is linked to, like, upheaval in his personal life. I know as business reporters are not supposed to talk about that. It's unprofessional or something, but I just, you can't get. It's part of the story, yeah.

It's part of the story. You cannot ignore the fact that, like, it seems like him and Grimes just broke up and he's resentful of whatever is coming out of that. And she and him have had public conflict on Twitter over some of his shit posting about pronouns and stuff. And so I think that there is a part of Elon who, you know, and this is just based on what I know about his personality, if he feels slighted, he's very, you know, he can be very vindictive. And so I think that like a lot of people on the internet these days, he might feel kind of like a punching bag and like, you know, hey, I'm the good guy. I'm trying to save the earth.

I'm trying to make us a multi-planetary species. And here, Bernie Sanders is yelling at me. I think we cannot ignore the fact that there is just some resentment happening here where he's like, I want to empower more of the kind of people who show up in my comments and, you know, send nasty notes to journalists who I don't like and get deplatformed for their views and for other things that get, you know, tagged as hate speech. You know, I cannot help but think that there's a little part of Elon that's like, I'd love to kind of stick it to the man. And the man here is like the progress is on Twitter who are beating up on him every day.

Yeah. And I find it so strange that, you know, he's kind of been this person that, I mean, maybe you can help me figure out what's going on here. Because I find it strange that he has stood up for, you know, these values of being able to say whatever you want online, where he does say whatever he wants online. and there's never been a threat of him getting banned. In fact, Jack Dorsey's held him up as a user that people should, you know, someone who uses Twitter the right way. Yeah. I mean, with this here, I can only speculate, right?

Like, who knows the mind of Elon here? I don't know. I know that there's just a lot of aggrieved Elon-like people, you know, in my Twitter mentions where he has a cult of personality and the slightest critique of him really brings them out. He seems to sort of thrive on their attention. He really likes that kind of validation. So it does feel just sort of weirdly personal.

But then everything Elon does is weirdly personal, right? Like he's a very kind of, you know, I mean, he's a deep thinker, but he's also been always been kind of impulsive, clearly. you know he'll tell you that himself so you know look it's one percent of his net worth can he just throw a couple billion dollars at an act of sort of pure ego um sure he does it all the time i mean you know he he bought his cousins a failing solar roof tile company uh and and you know activist investors are still after him about that and and probably would have succeeded in curbing his power if Tesla hadn't been doing so well overall.

Chris Pimbs is with us here on the big technology podcast. He's a technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of arriving today from factory to front door, why everything has changed about how and what we buy. He's mentioned a little bit about this political debate as far as Elon trying to stick it to the progressives. I think that's probably the most fascinating part of this whole situation because there are some really interesting contradictions when it comes to doing stuff like that and running a business, that is Twitter. What does that mean when you're the company's biggest independent

investor? We'll cover that right after the break. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than two million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're

using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Chris Mims, Technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal. So Chris, I want to ask you about this whole thing about Elon trying to stick it to the progressives, because there's an argument out there that the content moderation that the progressives on Twitter want is actually good for business, that when you have have less neo-Nazi flame wars on the service. It makes it a place where advertisers are more comfortable advertising. And then you can make more money because no one wants to show,

you know, show an ad for tide in the middle of, you know, a white supremacist flame war. So do you think if Elon actually takes off some of the restraints, the content moderation restraints, it will help Twitter's business because it matters to some extent now that he's invested so much money in it? Or do you think he just doesn't care about the money that he's invested and he's all about ideology on this one? It is really hard to say because because this investment is, I mean, I think I'm going to answer a different question than that, but I think it's an important one. It is strange to how a typical this investment is for Elon, right? Like, I mean, if we just look at what he's done lately, I mean, maybe it's no stranger than his in that, than his

supportive open AI, which he declared was because he thinks that AI is the biggest threat to humanity of the next century, or, you know, his investment in, or his founding neuralink, which is literally a brain computer interface company. But this is, he's never put money into a social media company. So it's hard to predict what's really going to play out here. You know, yes, if they take the guardrails off, and I've written about this extensively and researched it pretty deeply. Like, if they take more of the guardrails off, it could really hurt Twitter's ability to make money because, yeah, advertisers don't want to be adjacent to hate speech, etc. So it's going to be really interesting to see how he navigates that.

It's also interesting that, you know, the current CEO of Twitter, Pragg Agrawal, you know, tweeted, hey, we added Elon to our board. You know, we've been having conversations with him. and it's become clear that he would bring great value to our board. Wow. I mean, that's quite an endorsement. I don't think that that's because there's a gun being held to his hand, to his head, although maybe there's an element of that. I hesitate to speculate what changes.

I mean, maybe Elon just wants an edit button, right? Who knows? I mean, Elon is a product guy, right? You know, he does have that knack for like, hey, you know, the door handles should be flushed with the door, and everybody's going to love that. Like, those little details he is good at. So, I don't know. I mean, honestly, what changes do you think he's going to make

based on your own research and what you've read? I think it's really hard to say. I mean, the question is, like, what do you do to the product? It's hard to say what else you do to the product. I've always felt that Twitter sort of plays an important role in society. It's actually done a pretty good job of bringing new and casual users into the product. And so I've never really felt that they're, you know, given that, I've never really felt that there's a magical switch that you can flip to turn

Twitter into a two billion user product overnight. It just doesn't seem possible to me given the format. They're going to be people who are going to want to know the news immediately and they're going to be on Twitter or they're going to want to be there for the memes and those memes register with them and they'll be on Twitter. But I think that you'll, you will inevitably have most of the population who'd feel more comfortable on an Instagram and something that's more visual and less newsy. I mean, I think it's important to point out that like Twitter designed itself. under Jack Dorsey to go from the sort of all-purpose celebrity, you know, sports type of thing to be a news first product. And that's going to appeal to a big portion of the population,

but not an enormous part of the population. And so, you know, I'm curious maybe Elon tries to pivot it back. But I also wonder, again, whether this is going to be a moment where he does take the restraints off of some of the content moderation. I actually have a tweet that I want me to respond to from Mike Solano is a venture capitalist. He says, and he's talking about, you know, I brought up the argument that that content moderation could be good for business because it makes Twitter safer for advertisers. Here's what Mike Solana has to say. Professional hall monitors who fundamentally misunderstand Elon as motivated by money, trying to persuade him to their side. Have you considered censorship is good for business? Bro, he's the richest man in

the world and he just to shipwost in peace you lost. Do you think that there's any merit to what he's saying? Well, I'm having trouble parsing that tweet because I'm having trouble understanding how much of it is ironic. So is he saying that Elon, he doesn't care about whether Twitter does well or not? Like, he's just motivated to make it a place that's friendlier to him or something? I think that's what he's saying. That basically, like, you're basically saying that, like, don't worry about the business.

he doesn't care about the business he cares about again like this whole like yeah ship posting culture and he wants that to persist and if that's the case and maybe he's being ironic but if that's the case that that's fascinating i think you're right it's a very peculiar investment because we've never seen someone put billions of dollars into a company who actually you know is whose interests are lying contradiction to the business's performance well i mean Elon has always said that he's he's a mission person. And I think that there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, look, this is the same thesis that Matt, Matt Levine articulated in his, you know, famous newsletter. He's, he's like, Elon, he put it in a funny way. He's like, Elon likes to be annoying on Twitter and he wants to do something that will

allow him to be more annoying on the service. This is fundamentally the calculus for him. I mean, whether you think he's being annoying or not. Yeah, I mean, actually, I think there is a lot. lot of truth of that, you know, he doesn't, he's, this isn't a Carl icon coming in and being like, you're mismanaged. We can extract money from this business. I think that, uh, another thing that Matt observed, which is true is that, you know, people talk about, you know, Twitter is a place where anybody can share. And that's why it's so democratized and everything. But it's fundamentally, if you look at the, who has influence there, it is, it is all about elites. Like, where else can you go to see all these famous people and, you know, whatever, blue checks like

URI and political reporters and politicians, all, you know, battling with each other, embarrassing themselves, et cetera. So, um, it's a perfect description of Twitter. Yeah. I mean, he, he, he, Twitter actually is, is, is surprisingly about elites and elitism. And, um, you know, Musk is a person who wants to influence the world in a way that he thinks will make it better. So, you know, he's, he's, he's done what he can with making us

multi-planetary and moving us off of fossil fuels. So why not tackle culture next, right? Because culture precedes politics, as they say. I mean, you know, maybe this is his version of, you know, Peter Thiel moving into politics, but, you know, he's, he's going to control the means of meme production at this point. exactly i think someone on twitter put it um kind of perfectly he says he's securing the raw materials responsible for tesla's valuation and i thought that that was so perfect yeah that's a great point

i mean here you know musk has this in common with trump and that he really knows how to use this platform for his own ends whether that's uh yeah whatever that is wherever that's burnishing his image or bumping his stock, the stock price or communicating directly with investors, you know, without any kind of filter. I mean, look, famously, Musk fired his entire, some wing of his communications or PR staff. Like, you can still, there's still a skeleton crew in there. You can try to get a comment out of them, but he just doesn't have that apparatus that every other, at Tesla, that every other company has, because he can just knows how to reach people directly, primarily through Twitter.

Right. And that is basically exactly what Trump did through the 2016 campaign, and it did help him get elected. So now that we're on to Trump, how soon do you think it is before Donald Trump is reinstated to Twitter? Because it has to be a matter of if not, not when, right? Or when not if. It feels like, God, this is such a, okay, let's not make them. metaphor it feels like it feels like the run-up to so many other things that have in recent history that have felt like there's a red line there and you think like oh surely that person's not going to cross that red line but you know frankly I think we've all been disabuse of those notions in the

past few years and yeah I think that Elon is going to sort of do the unthinkable for Trump's political opponents anyway which is still the majority of Americans and um yeah how can he say all he's said about free speech and not and being a free speech absolutist and not reinstate him geez yeah i don't know i mean i i think it i think the quite it all comes down to how long until elon loses interest right i mean if he were so focused on his last three projects there would already be a tunnel network under the rockies um you know brain machine interfaces would be the version

one that doesn't actually penetrate the skull would be on sale and you know I don't know what else. The cyber truck would have already rolled out or something. Yeah, where is that truck? I would like to drive that truck. Yeah, well hey, the factory's going up in Austin, Texas. Okay. Also Elon's new home.

So apparently not too long. So yeah, if he stays focused on this and I think maybe he will because he seems so addicted to Twitter Like, it seems to dominate his attention in a way that nothing other than, you know, his companies does. Yeah, geez, I don't know, 12 months. Yeah.

I mean, the challenges that you mentioned, right, they're all a lot more difficult than hitting the unblock button on Trump. So, I mean, they haven't deleted his account. Remember, it's a permanent suspension. So I would say it probably happens within six months. Wow. How much power do you think that Elon is going to have inside the company? Because the way that the company is phrasing it, it seems like he's going to have a ton. Here's a tweet from Jack Dorsey yesterday.

He says, I'm really happy Elon is joining the Twitter board. He cares deeply about our world and Twitter's role in it. And this comes to the really interesting part. Barag, who's the CEO of Twitter and Elon, both lead with their hearts. And they will be an incredible team. I don't think I ever remember one board member being put on par in a state. and saying they're going to be a team member as opposed to an advisor to the CEO. So it does seem like he's going to have outsized power inside the company.

What's your read on it? Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, corporate boards, especially lately, are usually just toothless and they just rubber stamp what these powerful tech CEOs do. I mean, corporate boards, especially of tech companies, let's say. So that is pretty amazing. I would say even shocking. I mean, there must have been, look,

Elon can be a charming guy when he wants to be. So I imagine there have been some free-ranging and very intense conversations between these folks and Elon. I have to say that I am not optimistic about this honeymoon lasting very long. because we don't even have to like talk about Elon's personal life, although I think that does bear on it. Again, just looking at his other projects,

Elon is somebody who gets very interested in things. He is very good at motivating people to, you know, follow him. You know, I think he is genuine in his strong feelings about these things. You know, he has a tremendous, he still has a tremendous intellect and capacity for assimilating facts and modeling things and you know he probably has come to them with some ideas that they've never thought of and they're like oh wow you know like here we have the genius behind SpaceX and Tesla suddenly earnestly trying to improve our service in a way that you know people haven't thought of before but how long is that going to last and and and the day that he

let's say reinstates Trump or there's some other free speech controversy and you know a 10th of Twitter's engineering staff just quits on the spot, what's going to happen next? I just call me a cynic, but there is no way this honeymoon is going to last. I think I call you a realist on that. And it certainly puts Twitter CEO Paragawa in a terrible position. I mean, he comes in as this, you know, former CTO, basically. I don't want to short change the CTO, but like, you know, the number one thing that could go wrong if he doesn't do his job is that the site goes down.

and now he is he is responsible for navigating some extremely difficult you know some of the most difficult political questions in tech um and he's got Elon there to make who's going to make demands and Elon has the support of Jack Dorsey it's like how do you how do you run a business in that environment and I think it's very telling that you know when uh Elon's investment was announced earlier this week um not as I couldn't find a single Twitter employee celebrating the fact that Elon would come on board. And here is, you know, undoubtedly like one of the most successful business people of our time who believes, you know, who seemingly believes in the company enough that he's going to put billions of his own money into it and buy 9%. And yet

Twitter employees were quiet. And I saw some, you know, some people saying that like, that's an unfair observation because Twitter likes to handle things in-house. But give me a break. Like, you know, they are very vocal when they're happy about things. And they're quiet when they're run happen. And so it seems to me that this is going to be a culture clash between Elon and the employee base, which I find fascinating. I agree. I mean, I think, I think you're, you're setting the wheel spinning and I think you're, you're turning into my assignment editor on this story. I'm just thinking of the last, I'm not going to name names here, but I'm just thinking of the last Twitter employee that I kind of really went deep with in a piece. And I'm just thinking, what would this

person make of of jack endorsing Elon of the new CEO endorsing Elon of Elon saying that he's a free speech absolutist honestly i cannot imagine them being very happy about this so i think that is an excellent point and i think that the other thing that we can't discount and and you know we've certainly seen this at facebook is that um the reputation and the and the values of the CEO matters in the battle for talent. Now, obviously, like, Facebook still has plenty of engineers. You know, Microsoft has survived many long winters and come out as the favorite tech company of many other people who buy their services. But, yeah, I think that there, as there has been previously at Google and elsewhere, there is going to be a real clash of values here, potentially.

yeah and so i also uh like you to respond to this tweet from neal dash who says who reacted to elan joining the board he said yeah that's bad which they would have taken any of the many other suggestions of active users who could have been added to the board over the years including those who are developers or experienced creators of healthy communities does he have a point there um yeah yes yeah i think i think i think he does have a point yeah i mean i think i think i think his point sort of just stands for itself which is that right twitter has had plenty of opportunities to bring in uh other other folks to influence its direction um you know what why why Elon now i mean look the dude's the biggest shareholder

yes money yeah yeah exactly yeah um yeah and look maybe on the bright side at least twitter is going to have a board member that actually uses the product because that doesn't seem to the case, maybe outside of Jack, but I think, though, I think you could also make the argument that Twitter's greatest asset through the years has been benign neglect, has been frankly that it is so little changed from its origins for good and for ill. I mean, in that way, it's almost an open protocol already. It's almost like email or something. where it's just like impossible to change the protocol so they just never have because they can't get consensus so just email you know and now we're seeing this renaissance of of new models as you well

know all built on the back of email because like hey it's an open protocol and it's pretty simple and everybody can just have their own client i mean look maybe that's where twitter's already going and and musk wants to take it um but yeah i mean the optics are not great so so so i think that Twitter's own CEO has a really kind of, is balancing on a knife edge here where, okay, you know, if Elon pushes them to like, you know, open it up, make it more decentralized, I think a lot of people will probably be fine with that. But if Elon pushes them to, you know, start making different kinds of decisions in terms of their content moderation, it's going to be a real challenge for them.

I mean, you could see a, it's funny, you could see a mass defection, but, where. Exactly. And yeah, it is interesting that Twitter employees are like the most mission-driven employees that you'll find in the tech world. Okay, we're coming towards an end. So here's the big question. Do you think Elon's involvement is going to be a net good or bad for Twitter? It's been a net good for their stock price, right? Yeah, I mean, they've been up like, I don't know, they're up at least 30% this week. It's, you know, we're not even halfway over. So. Yeah. I mean, I mean, look, Elon's an agent of chaos in a lot of places and a lot of markets.

I mean, he, you know, generally makes the value of things go up. So I, I, while I hesitate to predict anything in the long term, like, it does feel like this is going to bring a lot of fresh energy and scrutiny on the company, but again, it comes down to what what is he influencing them to do right i mean if he influences them to open up twitter in a way that really does increase its user base like that'll be tremendous it'll be tremendous for twitter it's what everybody's talked about forever and then sort of gave up on um you know if he influences them in ways that just kind of alienate the core user base without bringing on a lot of extra uh users then obviously it's it's just going to be terrible

so i yeah yeah i don't know I mean, I think to answer that question, you have to get into, like, second and third order effects. Like, wait a minute, how much of the company does Elon need to own to have enough voting rights that he can potentially replace the CEO if he wants? Because that'll determine how much influence he has. I mean, Twitter, as far as I know, is not, you know better than I probably, they're not one of these companies that had the super voting shares like Facebook did. Right. So there you go. I mean, Twitter, weirdly is kind of old school. and that the board could replace the CEO if they wanted. Yeah, and I think you make a great point that Elon, as long as Elon's money is in there,

it's really hard to imagine the stock going under what it was earlier this week. So I think that 25, 29% jump that we're seeing this week is going to be permanent. Now, on the business side, you know, one of the things that's underrated is that Twitter had an activist investor come in in 2020, Elliott Management, and they only took a about 4% of the company, and the product group basically went into overdrive and shipped more in like a couple of years than they had in five years previously. And they actually built a pretty successful feature inside the company, their clubhouse clone spaces. So if they, if Elliott management was able to, you know, light a fire under the butts of people inside

Twitter, then I think Elon definitely will. And the question is what, you know, if he if he does, you know, for instance, push, you know, really hard on the content moderation front and open it that way, you know, is that going to do enough damage to sort of mitigate, to erase some of the gains that you might see from the product team? And frankly, I don't know, I'm curious what you think about this, but it seems like the content moderation complaints are somewhat overblown. I don't want to say that they're not without merit. I think these companies can tend to overmoderate in times, although it's a really hard line to find. But I think most people in the middle would sort of, you know, within, you know, maybe a small degree of error,

largely agree with most of the content moderation decisions that are made inside these companies. What do you think? Yeah, content moderation's really, really, really, really hard. As everyone who is a part of this, who has ever taken a good or bad faith stab at doing it, knows. I mean, it is, you just, I feel like being in charge of, a social media property is the least forgiving job on earth because you're always going to piss off somebody because at the end of the day, yes, it's social, but it is, it is media and your content moderation decisions reflect your values, you know, like it or not. And that, you know, it affects

the business. Look, in this day and age, if you want to, you know, make a lot of your revenue from advertising, you've got to be very careful about the decisions you make. Otherwise, your gab or your truth social, and we know at least what's happened to truth social, you know, you will forever marginalize yourself because you're the one American network of social mediums. When if you want to be big and you want to cast a big tent, you've got to be closer to the, you know, frankly, you've got to be closer to like the C&M. of these things and you're always going to piss somebody off and that anger is always going to be directed at you. I mean, whether Twitter is overmoderating or not. Like, I mean, they have

made some questionable decisions like, what was it? They banned any links to the, what was it, a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop, you know, like that I think felt like an overreach. Even if it was a fake story, it's like, well, at that point, you've, got a, wait, you're banning a news outlet? You know, I mean, it's, it's, if, if the entire news outlet is fake, because it's just a Russian troll farm, that's one thing. Right. And there's no way that would have happened, I think, if Elon was on the board. So that will have some immediate impact in terms of them being more reserved about their decisions. Hey, um, before we jump, um, I'm curious how your LinkedIn experiment is going. You've said, I think you said a couple

times that you're exploring LinkedIn. I've been pretty active on the platform. So yeah, what's the state of that? I mean, to be perfectly honest, like I like LinkedIn and I like playing around there. But I think that overall, I just have to plug the health and mental health benefits of minimizing exposure to all social media. And I honestly think that where I stand now is, I am the world. biggest fan of email newsletters like yours others um i i i love human curation i love that

there's so many humans who want to wade into the morass of social media for me and and frankly some of these newsletters that i love are are showing me corners of social media that i just i wouldn't find on my own no matter how many hours i spent scrolling so bizarrely i i'm getting to the point where i think that the best way to consume social media is secondhand, primarily. And then, of course, I'm going to dip in myself, you know, a few minutes a day. But, you know, look, you and I are part of an industry where so much of what we're sourcing and talking about and the drama that we're citing, it's all there. It's being parsed by other humans and made sense of.

So for the same reason that I don't sit down and read a stack of ads. academic journals every week, you know, I rely on other trusted sources to filter that for me. I don't know how much we need to be exposing ourselves directly to social media if we have really good trusted sources who are doing some human curation for us. Love it. Well, look, I will be on, I admire it because I did DM you on Twitter asking you to join the show. And then I was like, let me try email. Finally, it worked. I was like, Damn, Chris is like great self-resprain, especially on a daylight today. So, all right, we're out of time.

I'll be speaking of which I'll be on LinkedIn, taking questions about the show. We have a newsletter as well. Chris, if you want to join and make use of your, you know, whatever hour of social media time a day or week, you know, please do. So if folks are interested in that conversation, you come find me in my page is Alex Cantorwitz. Grab Chris's book. It's called Arriving Today from Factory to Front Door. where everything has changed about how and what we buy. It's especially pertinent now that the supply chain

is causing all this chaos in the economy and might actually be the thing driving up inflation and not the Fed rates. So you're going to want to read it. And you should also check out Chris's columns in the Wall Street Journal. They're always great. And that is where we will leave it today.

Chris, thanks so much for joining. Yeah, Alex. Generally a pleasure. Awesome. Thank you, Nick Guatney, for doing the editing, especially returning this wrong quickly, given the Elon News doesn't stop. Appreciate you, man.

Thank you, LinkedIn. and for having me as part of your podcast network. It's been a blast. Let's keep it going. Thanks to all of you, the listeners, for coming back each Wednesday. Appreciate you joining us. Come back next Wednesday for a new show with a tech insider or outside agitator. And until then, take care.