Mark Zuckerberg owes Elon Musk a huge debt of gratitude. Never before has his character been viewed more sympathetically by the tech community and the public alike. This is despite the fact that applauding the Meta boss and the launch of Threads feels like cheering for Mussolini. Thanks to the latter’s ceaselessly puerile antics and evident inability to distinguish sound business ideas from ploys conceived on a hallucinogenic trip that probably should not have lived beyond their transparently desperate performative cries for attention (see SEC v. Elon Musk), the Zuck has almost overnight become the crowd favorite and the smart money's bet to win the (economically insignificant) digital turf battle for micro-blogging.
Meta last week dropped two atomic bombs on the hermit kingdom that is Twitter. The first was its 500 million daily active Instagram users who could sign up for and access its carbon copy of Twitter in a matter of seconds. At the time of writing this, over 100 million users have so far signed up for Threads, and that is without the entire EU and despite the Great Firewall of China.
The second bomb dropped was Meta’s deadly combination of its core competency of effective imitation with only limited resources and investment to ensure that its ersatz Twitter platform functioned at a level above the ever-lowering bar being set by the target. It turns out that it does require more than a few people to operate a functionally and commercially viable social network (which was, lo and behold, not just a website). Cutting around 80% of the headcount might have something to do with product deterioration. The ersatz product instantly became the standard. Just ask Snap how that works.
Twitter, it must be acknowledged, was already in a sorry state of total disarray by the time Meta launched its attack. Free speech is the prerogative of government and society. The responsibility to defend and sustain it does not belong to for-profit enterprises. The notion that it ever was is preposterous and only appealed to radical voices who felt censored by basic standards of civility and those too artless to effectively express their ideas in ways that pierced mores while also paying lip service to them.
Short of achieving its farcically noble mission to defend free speech, Musk and his team of sycophantic charlatans took a good idea for enhanced user monetization and distorted it into a version that had the inverse effect. Charging certain users for premium features and a few blue and white pixels affixed to their usernames was likely a solid strategy for increasing revenues and ultimately enhancing the user experience. But offering anyone and everyone willing to fork over $8 a month for those formerly prestigious pixels was flatly obtuse.
To layer on top of the platform’s woes, its new owner’s public full-on red pill persona and incessant need to be in the headlines probably did not endear Twitter to users beyond those happy to find a welcoming environment outside of 4chan, i.e., a hostile environment for most members of civil society. One would have imagined that $44 billion in the largest-ever leveraged buyout might have been more judiciously invested – commiserations to the non-Musk equity holders.
Threads’ success, if measured by owning the micro-blogging market, is inevitable. Don’t be distracted by the moaning from the blue-check (completely too online) cohort who complain that Threads is not as good as Twitter, or that the T&Cs do not agree with their highly opinionated sense of what is fair in the digital realm. The reality is that these people’s opinions carry little weight outside of their feedback loop-enabled online circles, and more importantly, that a vast majority of users do not care one bit about fine print, data collection, or how “superior” the conversation is or ever was on Twitter.
Meta has the arsenal to keep on firing, and when it ramps up its advertising solutions across Threads and its other dominant digital platforms, you can never again expect to see an ad on Twitter that is not for some gimmicky earwax removal kit or some other unheard-of product that never needed to exist in the first place. Brand safety matters to marketers, and that does not comport with a maximalist (albeit hypocritically selective) free-speech platform. A town square where everyone has a soapbox and a megaphone for the low price of $8 is not a very fun place and is the last place where ad dollars will flow.
The best hope for Twitter is that corporate raiders buy its bank debt for pennies on the dollar. They could effectively take control by wiping out the currently worthless equity, removing Musk, and then fighting to reclaim Twitter’s ownership of the micro-blogging market with a long and expensive anti-trust battle. But it is difficult to imagine that the internal rate of return on such an investment would warrant the resources - especially as Threads continues to gain steam. Musk is already pursuing intellectual property infringement legal recourse. But as with most things he does outside of rockets, satellite-powered internet, and electric vehicles, we should take it with a grain of salt. Lest we forget that this is also a man who’s actually suggested a penis-measuring contest against his rival days after Threads launched. He or one of his worshipers should enter into the annals Musk’s treatise on power and strategy – von Clausewitz and Machiavelli are surely trembling in their graves.
It is rather poetic that Twitter’s failure as a platform will be the result of one of Musk’s ill-judged Tweets. He and his incorrigible boosters want us to think he is playing three-dimensional chess while rapidly immolating the value of the most overpriced purchase in the history of mankind while stiffing former Twitter employees, vendors, and even the arbitration firm representing him in his attempts to skip out on his bills. If he had not decided on whatever vice-induced whim that he would like to pretend he was serious about buying Twitter, then Threads would probably have never even existed. And in truth, Meta never even needed Threads to exist.
by Brandon K. White - Founder of Aperçu, Managing Partner at All We Have Is Now