How to Burn 44 Billion Dollars

Image: Midjourney

Ever since a manic, irrational multi-billionaire bought Twitter, there’s barely been a quiet moment. This weekend was true to form. 

First came the news that Twitter now requires anyone who wants to view a tweet to have an account. It hasn’t been confirmed by Elon Musk yet — so it could be just another bug or a feature pushed out by mistake — but given the slow growth of the platform’s user base, it’s more likely a tactic to try and force more signups. 

Yet, removing public access to tweets could hurt the site’s search engine ranking, which means fewer people visit the site. And when you need to drive traffic to drive signups to drive Twitter Blue subscriptions, that’s akin to shooting yourself in the foot. And let’s face it — the feature will be infuriating. Meta deploys a similar strategy, putting all its content behind a signup wall, and it just makes me want to do the opposite. When people hit the signup wall, I’d guess most will back the hell out. 

Musk wasn’t done yet. In another seemingly random outburst, he announced that Twitter was restricting the number of tweets users could view. The limit was set as low as 600 per day for unverified accounts before being upped to 1000. For verified users, i.e., Twitter Blue subscribers, the limit was 6000, and later 10,000. (The tweet was seen over 540 million times, which Musk later claimed was a record view count. How ironic.) Musk’s reasoning was something about “system manipulation,” and he once again called out the “extreme levels” of scraping from artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, who use Twitter’s data to train their large language models. Musk has repeatedly claimed this scraping damages the user experience. How? Unclear. The exact workings of this limit were also unclear, but some users were eating up this limit quickly, especially if they were opening threads. 

Forget A.I. This is just another attempt to push Blue subscriptions. The service, which Muck hoped could reduce reliance on ad dollars, is still languishing around the 650,000 mark. That's around $5 million annually, a far cry from a) the ad revenue, over $4 billion in 2022, and b) the $44 billion Musk needs to claw back eventually. In a recent edition of Trend Mill, I wrote that the next evolution of the internet would involve paying for every platform and service you use. I’m fully on board with this. It’s how platforms prioritizing human-created content will survive, especially in the A.I. age. But those services have to make that fee worthwhile. 

The strategy of limiting how long a user can spend on the platform is deeply flawed. Whether we like it or not, social platforms are designed to keep people using them as often and for as long as possible. It’s essential for powering the ad model that brings in those sweet, sweet dollars. The more people scroll, swipe, and click, the more ads they can have forced onto their eyeballs. To put a barrier in the way of this is a crazy move. Ad revenue has been declining since Musk’s arrival, and a huge % of the user base is already unhappy with the platform’s direction and seem to be waiting for an excuse to leave. What’s worse is he has also devalued the Blue offering — those subscribed (me included) get less for our money than we did yesterday.

And so, the latest exodus has begun. 

If the site makes it harder for users to view tweets, it opens the door for a successor to emerge. One is Bluesky, a decentralized version of Twitter founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. There was such an influx of signups over the weekend that they have been temporarily paused to allow the team “to resolve the existing performance issues.” Even Mastodon, often touted as the main competitor to Twitter but not yet delivering on that promise, enjoyed a substantial boost. One tracker claims over 80,000 new accounts were created in the past day and over 220,000 this week alone. 

Coincidentally, even Meta’s copycat initially appeared online, albeit by mistake. Now officially called Threads (how original), the app was discovered in the Google Play Store by an eagle-eyed “leaker,” who posted some screen grabs. Surprise, surprise, visually and functionally, it’s exactly like Twitter. I’ve long suspected Meta greenlit this project the second Musk walked through the doors of Twitter HQ and immediately fired almost everyone. They assumed it was only a matter of time before his “I know better” attitude collapsed the entire thing, and they wanted to pick up the pieces when it did. To this point, it hasn’t. But Meta may have hope yet. If the abandonment continues, Meta could be primed to suck up all those who leave. And with Threads looking and working almost identically, it removes any barriers and worries of those who don’t want to learn a new platform.

Screenshot of Threads

Musk hasn’t been here long, but the platform has already toyed with self-destruction on multiple occasions. Each time, the users get unhappier, and the vultures start circling. Those vultures are about to dive in to devour the carcass.

Despite the generally hostile reception to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, I had faith that he could build on the solid foundation he took over. After all, he does have 44 billion dollars resting on it. But, as he keeps spontaneously changing things (read: breaking things), the overall quality of content keeps dropping, and the bots and spam continue to run wild despite being the main issue he wanted to tackle, and the subscription model seemingly failing despite pay-gating almost every feature he could think up, I’m starting to lose that faith.

I thought it was too easy a take to claim Musk had essentially burned $44 billion when he acquired Twitter. But as time passes, perhaps it was the most obvious take for a reason — it’s true.

On that first day, when he entered HQ with a sink in hand, perhaps he wasn’t saying, “let that sink in.”

Perhaps what he was really saying was, “I’m here to sink it.”

To my American readers, happy holidays.