For a half billion dollars or so Elon could buy substack. It's a private company in the midst of a very painful and difficult fundraising cycle, they may not have much of a choice but to sell. Twitter would get a functioning monetization engine which favours creators, and apparently a functional product team.
Heck, he could keep the substack exec team under a heavy earn-out as the new Twitter exec team and declare victory, and go back to playing with rocketry and sports cars. Just returning his attention to Tesla would probably increase his net net worth with the acquisition.
Instead he's taking the pettiest of all paths. I genuinely feel sorry for him at this point, it's got to feel awful right now. I don't understand why one of the world's richest people would willingly subject themselves to his Twitter experience. He can afford to let go his ego this one time, he has nothing to gain and nothing to prove.
I don’t love the precedent for a quasi media company. But there is strategic value in signalling that if you compete with him, he’s going to blow you out of the water. (And his retaliation is unsavoury but fairly fought. Twitter has no monopoly. And Musk didn’t mobilise his adjacent companies.)
From Dec ‘22: “Twitter should be easy to use, but no more relentless free advertising of competitors. No traditional publisher allows this and neither will Twitter.”
> But there is strategic value in signalling that if you compete with him, he’s going to blow you out of the water.
Another way of interpreting that signalling is that everyone should gang up and stomp him so that he doesn't continue to pick the group off one by one.
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Well, I just tested if quoting the tweet that cannot be retweeted is quotable. The results are in: we can still quote the unquotable! Looks like the 'free speech absolutist' needs to go back to the drawing board. https://twitter.com/aiaaidan/status/1644493999061729280
I feel like quoting generates way more engagement than retweets, it's something active where you have some kind of "skin in the game", while retweets are passive. Often the worst tweets I see are through quote tweets, because they're made to enrage, to make you react.
Despite subscribing to dozens of substacks, I hadn't heard of notes until this controversy. I wonder if substack sees this as the best advertising they could have gotten for that platform, while also being terrified of the existential crisis that being banned from Twitter must mean to them.
Also, I am a drop in the ocean but all this makes me want to side with substack. I wonder if engagement happens like that, where you amplify your usage when a bully takes actions like Musk. Maybe thousands of drops like that move the needle significantly for substack.
Private company doing private company things. Twitter did the same thing to Meerkat before the takeover.
What this means is that given Substack’s announcement of the Notes feature, Twitter is both reacting to reduce Substack’s reach on Twitter as they are still in the middle of relaunching a newsletter competitor.
Either way, it would just make sense for Twitter to just buy up Substack since Substack failed to raise money from VCs and is desperately raising money from crowdfunding at mounting losses and no release of their 2022 financials.
"Free speech" has always been a misnomer. When someone can't defend their point from criticism they pretend it's oppression. Elon cats shit defending ego, not speech.
Heck, he could keep the substack exec team under a heavy earn-out as the new Twitter exec team and declare victory, and go back to playing with rocketry and sports cars. Just returning his attention to Tesla would probably increase his net net worth with the acquisition.
Instead he's taking the pettiest of all paths. I genuinely feel sorry for him at this point, it's got to feel awful right now. I don't understand why one of the world's richest people would willingly subject themselves to his Twitter experience. He can afford to let go his ego this one time, he has nothing to gain and nothing to prove.