.@elonmusk has shut up the doubters. #twittersold.
Ordinary billionaires buy sports teams or newspapers or private islands. There’s nothing wrong with that. @Red Sox @bostonglobe. But it just won’t do for the capo di tutti capitalists.
No, the vanity purchase in 2022 for the man who can buy anything is, obviously, @twitter. Elon Musk love-hates the thought-sharing network so much he bought the company. #RIPvictorkiam.
Why? Because he could.
But there’s more to it than just wanting to silence all the haters who questioned whether he was serious — or could pull it off.
The Oracle of Austin, well, he just loves, loves, loves to stir things up on Twitter. So much so that he struck a deal on Monday to acquire the company for $44 billion. He’s using other people’s money for more than half the purchase price because, you know, Musk is crazy, but he’s not stupid.
The @Tesla and @SpaceX boss is a professional Twitter user, with more than 84 million followers, and he wants to make Twitter “better.” Or maybe just not suck so much.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said Monday in a statement. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
All good ideas. Imagine how awesome Twitter would be if there were no limits on what you could say!
But dare I say that Musk is thinking too small? He’s coming at the problem from a user’s perspective. An edit button (hey, Slack has it). Open source algorithms — brilliant, whatever they are.
What Twitter also needs is more users and bigger profits. Facebook, for all its problems, is much bigger. TikTok is much cooler. (Elon, just ask Grimes.)
Will the world’s richest man have the time to fix Twitter users’ experience and make it more profitable?
Of course not. Musk already has two full-time jobs: Twitter troll and #crypto evangelist/market manipulator. And there are the many side hustles, including, but not limited to, saving the planet from global warming, colonizing Mars, and boring huge underground tunnels for. . . the hell of it?
That’s why I’m making myself available to serve as Twitter CEO to Musk’s chairman. I’d be his perfect Number 2 (not that I think he’s Dr. Evil).
If you check my LinkedIn profile, you’ll notice that I have never run a major corporation. Nor do I understand algorithms, advertising, or big data — which, apparently, are all important to Twitter’s business model. I’m barely on Twitter — who do you gotta know to get verified? — and most of my followers are porn bots.
But, if Musk taps me for the job, I’d be laser-focused on monetizing Twitter’s users in ways that should have been obvious to the soon-to-be former management. For example:
* No subscriptions; they’re so pandemic (see: @Netflix’s stock price). Instead, I’d eliminate the 280-character limit on each tweet and charge a penny per character, with no cap on a tweet’s length. It’ll be $1 per character for all politicians and celebrities. Memes will cost extra, like carry-on baggage.
* Premium tweet placement. I’m sure Twitter’s developers can come up with an automated auction system for users to buy their way to the top of users’ feeds, just like @Google does with its unbiased search. Twitter is leaving billions of dollars on the table — a fortune that could go into Musk’s retirement plan or help him pay the mortgage.
* Higher rates for misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and incitements to overthrow the government. Free speech doesn’t have to be free!
* Fees for retweets and likes. Twitter should get a cut when a tweet goes viral.
* Pay for amnesty™. This, I have to admit, is a grand slam. I’d permit banned users to buy their way back onto Twitter. The fee will be a sliding scale based on the number of followers the individual had before getting kicked off, starting at $50 million. Cash or crypto only.
.@elonmusk, I know you’re a busy man. But just think: If I tweeted this column under my new business model, Twitter would have booked $44 in revenue — plus any follow-on retweet/like fees. Of course, not all tweets would be this long-winded. But when you are multiplying by 500 million tweets per day, we’re talking real money. Even for you.
Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com.