What Is Musk Actually Up To With Twitter?

As I've already said here, my take on Elon Musk is related to what I've gleaned about earlier American industrialists like Rockefeller Sr, Edward Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould. They didn't get that rich without knowing something, and that included knowing how to make a buck. I'm starting with the assumption that Musk knows more than most people about how to make a buck, and making a buck is his main interest.

It's worth noting that his best-known early investment was with the predecessor to PayPal, which revolutionized checking by eliminating the float, the extra balance everyone could carry by waiting days for checks to clear the bank. Musk knew something and figured out how to make a buck from it. And oh by the way, along with the web, it transformed mail order.

As a result, his takeover bid for Twitter must not be just a quixotic gadfly gesture. He was able to get financing for his bid, which he wouldn't be able to do if Wall Street thought he was just playing games. He thinks he can make a buck out of Twitter, and not just a couple of token percentage points, either. As with making electric cars a high-end consumer good, he's going to transform an industry, or maybe even create a new one from scratch.

My own view from a career in tech is that every tech business or IT department is hugely inefficient. Tech has prospered mostly because it's less inefficient than what it replaced, i.e. paper processing, manual calculation, and multiple procedural steps to get things done. On the other hand, its innovation has reached a plateau. Tech organizations have an interest in maintaining or increasing their levels of inefficiency. This is the first insight Musk has expressed, warning Twitter of new expectations:

Elon Musk has warned Twitter staff they face 'extreme' workloads when he takes over - but insists he'll still graft even harder than them to make the firm a success.

The tycoon replied to an earlier tweet he shared about his plans for the social media network Saturday, and wrote: 'Also, work ethic expectations would be extreme, but much less than I demand of myself.'

His original tweet had outlined Musk's tech-focused approach to running the firm, and said: 'If Twitter acquisition completes, company will be super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware.'

A week ago, I noted his telegraphed intent to fire the company's chief censor and general counsel. My guess is that he wants to get Twitter entirely out of the censorship business, and I would say this is less because he supports free speech than that he can't see why Twitter is giving a valuable product away for free. But if Twitter drops its for-free censorship model, it will force Google, YouTube, and other platforms to review their own losing business models and transform an industry just like PayPal transformed mail order.

Consider the immediate move of the Biden administration to create a "Disinformation Governance Board" following Twitter's acceptance of Musk's takeover offer. In other words, the Biden administration, which we may presume is aligned with the deep state, sees "disinformation governance", i.e. censorship, to be a highly valuable service, one that Twitter had been performing up to now for free, and for which the deep state is clearly now willing to budget serious money if Twitter will no longer provide it.

Musk, as an entrepreneur at the Rockefeller-Harriman level, could even suggest he could provide a for-profit censorship service at a reconstituted Twitter for less than the government would spend itself and still make a buck -- and we can't completely rule that out as a future move. But there can be no question that Twitter's current censorship operation is running at a loss, because the company isn't billing anyone for it now, and the whole project may just not be an efficient use of tech anyhow.

But beyond that, Musk not only tweeted that there would be greater expectations of work ethic and that the company would be "super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware". If you think about it, that would put it much more on a traditional Silicon Valley path like Hewlett-Packard or even the traditional IBM, which in its days of greatness offered a full hardware-software architecture, as well as pioneering information security. This is beyond Microsoft, which is software only, or Apple, which offers a limited spectrum of product focused on the consumer and entertainment.

I spent the first part of my tech career working with "IBM classic", the comprehensive "360" architecture when the business rule of thumb was that you couldn't be criticized for going with an IBM product. But as a contrarian, I always resisted that mindset (and was sometimes written up for it). Once PC desktop architecture, Unix, and networking gained ground, IBM stumbled and stagnated. To my mind, though, in its day, it made a lot of money with that formula, and if Musk can come up with a new 360-type architecture that covers the field, more power to him.

If he was behind PayPal, I wouldn't put it past him, but he's clearly transforming the space industry with Space X, turning the stodgy and underperforming NASA on its head, but expanding into communications as well. Not for nothing does Russia see him as a threat:

The head of Russia’s space agency is threatening Elon Musk with consequences for supplying satellite internet to Ukraine with SpaceX’s Starlink system.

On Saturday, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, posted a message to his Telegram channel, condemning Musk for expanding Starlink’s service to Ukraine, which is facing an ongoing invasion from Russia.

In the message, Rogozin accused Musk of supplying the Starlink dishes to the Ukrainian military, which he described as “Nazis.”

Ukraine, or at least Space X's involvement there, is the least of it. Russia has been forced to scale down its own involvement in space, creating a vacuum Musk will fill. Remarkable and highly underrated guy, an Edison more than a Jobs.