Twitter’s Future Is a Return to Elon Musk’s Past

If Twitter had a full-time CEO, he or she would have come to this conclusion in half the time. Twitter doesn’t have the scale to compete on an ad model, and their ad tools are substandard. However, they are unwittingly starching their hat blue and could acquire several of the remaining independent media properties (Lee, McClatchy, Condé Nast, Hears... See more

In the heady days of the millennial media startup boom of the 2010s, the sense that large social platforms would pay publishers for content and create a new class of lucrative digital media outlets was pervasive and unquestioned. And in those early years, no one knew which platforms would succeed. It is almost impossible to believe, but there was a... See more

That day—the morning I turned up at his desk and took an inventory—wild shit was happening. Elon Musk was buying Twitter and Sam had been on the phone with one of Musk’s advisors, Igor Kurganov. Kurganov was a Russian-born former professional poker player to whom Musk had entrusted the task, it was reported, of giving away more than $5 billion wort

... See more

Without getting too deep in the weeds, Elon is basically saying that control of and the ability to contribute to public narratives has shifted from traditional media (i.e., broadcasters, newspapers, and the people they employ) to everyone else; creators, especially on X.

He’s not wrong. Neither is he precisely right. He is certainly the media. And a... See more