With apologies to Monty Python…
There has been a lot of news about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Some think having a single rich person in charge of a social media platform is the end of times. I’m willing to give Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt… the guy is all in on using fundamental principles to advance the state of the art in a lot of areas, some more successful than others (Tesla, SpaceX)… so far.
Unfortunately he might have gotten this one wrong. Looking at a rocket and calculating the raw material cost and wondering why launches were 150x that is one thing… that is all physics and engineering. Not easy, but at least it follows rules. Twitter on the other hand is populated by human beings (and apparently, lots o bots), who simply don’t. If we followed rules, Economics would actually be able to predict things.
I hope I’m wrong. Maybe he’ll somehow revolutionize social media like his companies have electric cars and space travel. But, I think he might be making the classic mistake of assuming others see things like he does.
In the end, maybe the best thing he could do with his $44B investment would be to just fire everyone, shut it all down, and go back to solving physical engineering problems. I’d way rather see SpaceX set down on Mars than Twitter… do anything differently, or really anything at all.