Musk charging for blue checks is an absolute no-brainer and establishes a baseline for human user metrics
The Marxist-educated MBA financial pundits have no clue what's happening.
I swear I did not intend for this to be an account dedicated to Musk, but that’s the way it seems to be going. I don’t care about the social media aspect, but more about the business and tech side.
The leftist business punditry have no idea what’s happening. They never do, and it’s always shocking how their Marxist spoon-fed economics education leaves them completely befuddled when attempting to analyze anything related to real business.
A business has to make money. I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s true. Musk is not dumb, and has figured out that $8 per month is the right price point for this part of the overall revenue model. These would be humans paying this money, so right off the bat you establish a guaranteed baseline of user metrics.
Don’t underestimate the importance of that. It gives the business a backbone. A foundation. Understand it’s also going to grow, while delivering a massive blow to bots.
Most people can shell out $8 per month, and certainly overpaid fake news propagandists can cover that, since they have expensive college degrees and presumably an education that gave them life skills to scrounge up that kind of scratch. Well, at least until they get fired and have to settle for a job at Starbucks.
Don’t look at Twitter as you’re used to seeing it, with an incredibly bloated workforce, fancy office building in a city with an incredibly costly city, and fraudulent metrics. Imagine a Twitter without the office building, with the core product run out of Tesla in Austin without current staff.
In my previous post I referenced the Tesla Phone. See where I’m going?
Imagine over 90% of the staff fired, including engineering. Now imagine Tesla engineers improving and maintaining the code base and product line.
I can’t stress enough to the non-software development crowd how trivial and rudimentary an application like Twitter, or any social media platform is, especially when compared to Musk’s other ventures (I wrote about this in the previous post). For Musk’s engineers with Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring, something like Twitter is a joke in terms of sophistication and required engineering smarts.
What innovation has Twitter achieved in the last few years? A single retweet button asking you to take an extra step to specify if you want to add a quote? While Agrawal was thinking of new ways to dampen intellectual discourse, here’s what Musk’s engineers were working on:
See the difference?
As sure as I’m typing this, in a few months, or at least some time in 2023, with the exception of a handful of engineers, the ENTIRE Twitter staff will be axed, and the codebase will be run by Musk’s engineers out of Tesla. It’s already started:
New Twitter owner Elon Musk has pulled more than 50 of his trusted Tesla employees, mostly software engineers from the Autopilot team, into his Twitter takeover, CNBC has learned.
Musk, who is CEO of automaker Tesla and reusable rocket maker SpaceX, completed the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 28 and made his mark there immediately. He fired the company’s CEO, chief financial officer, policy and legal team leaders right away, and has also dissolved Twitter’s board of directors.
According to internal records viewed by CNBC, employees from Musk’s other companies are now authorized to work at Twitter, including more than 50 from Tesla, two from the Boring Company (which is building underground tunnels) and one from Neuralink (which is developing a brain-computer interface).
Imagine with that subscriber base, and with a more granular and sophisticated ad system where users see ads relevant to them. Imagine them revamping Vine to compete with TikTok.
But what about advertisers? This is supposed to be the biggest victim with Musk’s subscription model, but it will be his biggest advantage. This is really delicious since advertisers have been lied to about user metrics over the years.
Who do you think will be Musk’s first advertisers? Before you answer that, think of Starlink, Tesla Phone, and Tesla. Those alone would be some high-quality ads.
Who competes with those companies? Starlink competes with Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and the others. Tesla Phone competes with the Android phones, and iPhone. Who competes with Tesla? Last time I checked, other auto manufacturers are in the EV market, along with non-EV. If you don’t understand that his competitors are going to buy ad space on Twitter, then I can’t help you.
How much revenue are we up to now? Throw in the local targeted ads, and what are we at now? Vine will make money. Throw in crypto. Remember Musk’s bigger play for Twitter — his X product, the American version of China’s WeChat, that will compete against PayPal?
How much coin do you think he’ll make on that? Then account for products and services we haven’t yet considered. He’ll also make money by paying creators. It sounds counter intuitive, but that’s how it will work out.
He essentially just hooked up a revenue hose straight into Starlink (again, no expensive building lease, no bloated staff, ops completely absorbed by Tesla).
This subscription model is not only the smart thing to do, but for the first time in years, it gives Twitter a stable base to provide metrics of human users, and a platform to grow.