What should Elon do?

Tony Curzon Price, April 17th 2023

(MidJourney prompt: “1930s film poster orson welles crossed with elon musk as citizen kane turning newspaper into a bank and starting to love his readership” )

I do feel for Elon. That moment in the BBC interview when he remarks at how hard it is not to be loved by the users of the platform you’ve just taken over. I have to say that I feel particularly close to Elon in that moment, because I went through something rather similar myself. I too was in a very deep-tech, very geeky, hardware corner of Silicon Valley when I looked up and became enthralled by the emerging power of web-media. I quite suddenly lost interest in hardware and I found a struggling media platform to run. I could see that technology was going to change this industry beyond belief and that this in turn would change the world, and I wanted to be part of that excitement. But for me, as for Elon, I expect, moving from deep tech to human media was harder than I ever imagined, personally transforming and somewhat traumatic.

Of course, I mean all of the above slightly in jest. I left geeky hardware with a rapidly depleting bank balance to show for it, not as the world’s richest man. And the platform that caught me was miniscule, not one of the greatest and most controversial social media channels in the world. And yet there’s a kernel of truth - I feel I sympathise with Elon, and I am definitely interested in the journey he is on. I have some predictions about how it will transform him and Twitter…

But before any of that, let me offer my 2c on how he should put the fire out - or rather start a new fire, one that will sustain the business and allow the really interesting bit to happen - how a modern social media in the age of LLMs might work. Again, I also, at my scale, had a loss-making platform staffed with people who didn’t care about business sustainability, and I had very little time to do anything…

Elon needs a business model for Twitter, and there is one obvious one - attach a bank to it. Don’t give up on me just yet. Give me 1 minute to persuade you this is not crazy, not a libertarian fantasy, and nothing to do with crypto.

Here is the basic pitch:

• Small cash transfers on the web are still weirdly hard
• The big beasts in that supply chain - Visa and Mastercard - are some of the most egregious global monopolists lying in plain sight
• The barrier to entry to this space is essentially having an existing many-to-many message-passing network; everything else is commodity technology
• Twitter has that, and its entry would have the following benefits:

• Revenues could easily sustain the social media business
• It would provide much-needed competition to those awful incumbent rent-gougers
• It would make the life of the cyber-citizen much easier
• The combination of Know-Your-Customer regulation of finance and identity-checking in social media would create a genuine complementarity between the banking and media products

• And no, this has nothing to do with Dogecoin:

• Elon should keep all of this completely separate from Crypto - this was Zuck’s mistake when he allowed his payments platform to be taken over by libertarian crypto ideologues
• He could very easily start it in the UK using OpenBanking, which is the proper way to do digital finance

OK, Elon stabilises Twitter’s business and provides a really compelling reason for strong identity-checking on the platform.

What next?

LLMs are huge news for Twitter. He has the perfect platform to host specialist bots.

And what about the personal transformation that Twitter will bring to Elon?

My prediction: Twitter will civilise Elon because, as a businessman, he will start by seeing all users as customers. Then, because these “customers” are in fact on the platform, for the most part, as citizens, not consumers, that same entrepreneurial business virtue of living inside the skin of your customers will make him understand something which I think has been absent from his life to date: what it is like to be a citizen, one of many. That will be personally transformative.

But more on all this later.