Elon Musk is the latest rich guy to have
fallen for the trap of Twitter.
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For nearly its entire 16-year life, Twitter
has had the reputation that it hasn’t fulfilled its potential and could be so
much more. Twitter’s conundrum is that it’s widely known but not that widely
used, financially successful but not wildly so, sometimes competently managed
but also chaotic, and influential in a way that is exciting but also
terrifying.
The perpetual belief that Twitter is one big
idea away from being amazing has made many people think about buying the
company to make it shine, but hardly anyone wants to actually own it.
Whether you’re hooked on Twitter or among the
world’s majority that stays off the app, what happens to this company matters.
Twitter is a digital gathering place that world leaders increasingly fear and
want to control, and where elected officials, activists, journalists and
executives like Musk spread their messages and settle scores.
Musk made a half-baked proposal last week to
buy Twitter that effectively put a for-sale sign on the company. What happens
next is anyone’s guess.
Maybe Musk will wind up owning Twitter, if he
stays interested long enough to find moneybags to help him afford his offer of
about $43 billion. Perhaps a different billionaire, tech company or financial
investor will buy it instead. Maybe no one buys Twitter.
Living with an uncertain future is nothing new
for Twitter. You could spend days tallying the number of times that companies
have considered buying the social media site, or that there were rumors about a
possible sale.
Twitter has been perpetually for sale partly
for technical reasons. Unlike some tech and media companies including Google,
Facebook and The New York Times, Twitter doesn’t have a special type of stock
that empowers its founders to all but veto a sale.
But there is also the perennial belief that
Twitter should be something other than what it is. There’s no shortage of
people who believe that all Twitter needs is some fix — an edit function,
different management, a new type of technology backbone, a shift of advertising
strategy, lower expenses and app tweaks, or more lax rules of expression, as
Musk wants.
Politicians and other influential people,
including Musk, regularly complain that Twitter is censoring too much or too
little. And investors in Twitter perpetually say that the company doesn’t make
enough money.
If I could boil that down to a sentence, it’s
that Twitter is not Facebook, which has 23 times the annual revenue of Twitter
and nearly 2 billion daily users to Twitter’s 217 million. (The companies count
users slightly differently, but you get the point.)
“The cultural influence of Twitter is just as
great as Facebook and yet it’s one-twentieth of the size,” said Mark Mahaney,
who has followed Twitter for years as an investment analyst now with Evercore
ISI. That makes people ask, “‘What is wrong with Twitter?’” he said.
And yet the people and companies who have
looked closely at buying Twitter have mostly been scared off. In 2016, Disney
backed off its flirtation with buying it partly because executives worried
about trashing the company’s family friendly image if it owned an unruly social
media app. The Salesforce boss, Marc Benioff, changed his mind when
Salesforce’s investors hated the idea of a business software company owning
Twitter.
The government authorities most likely
wouldn’t permit companies that would seem to be a good fit with Twitter,
including Google and Facebook, to buy it because of antitrust concerns.
Twitter is too big, but also not big enough.
It is good, but also not good enough. It is not Facebook, which makes people
want to buy it but also not want to. Twitter could give any owner influence but
also unwanted heat.
Musk might be one of the few people in the
world who is brave (or foolish) enough to want to own Twitter and actually do
it. Maybe Musk is the one who can finally unleash Twitter’s potential. Or maybe
he’ll just wind up on the long list of people who once believed that they
could.
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