Let’s Be Honest: We Have No Idea Why Elon Musk Is Buying Twitter

A thought: Twitter has been languishing.

Their growth has been relatively dormant with few innovations and new features over the years. Their ad business has not scaled at pace with the advertising industry. Its ability to grow and retain users has been problematic. Its stock price has severely underperformed both their social media competitors, and the general tech industry at large. It has been challenged with content moderation (and more) for years… and that hasn’t been improved or resolved.

Twitter has been puttering along just fine.

That doesn’t make it bad or not relevant (I happen to love Twitter), it just means that it’s economic worth is not matched to its brand power or perceived impact on the zeitgeist. My personal feelings about Elon Musk are not relevant here. Maybe Twitter simply needs something/anything new because – from a business/leadership perspective – it’s not really growing/changing all that much (and, maybe, this is why the board has approved Elon’s offer?).

But I don’t know… and I wish more people would say the same thing.

Why is Elon making a bid for Twitter? I don’t know… and from what I’m reading/listening/watching, I haven’t seen a salient reason from any of the digital media experts, journalists and thought leaders. And, that’s very curious to me.

I’m going to be truthful…

Unlike many of the other pundits who are blabbing away, I’m not sure I fully understand any of this. I’m not sure why, considering how busy Elon is with Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, OpenAI and The Boring Company, that he even has time or energy for fixing what’s broken with Twitter and social media. If this is just about another billionaire trying to control a media property, fine (we’ve seen that story before… and so it goes.. history keeps repeating itself). That could be it. Still, I have no idea. I don’t think the Elon money or a changing of the guards will do that much to get more people to use Twitter more frequently (or encourage bigger media companies to spend more). But… I could be wrong… I wish I could be more insightful (because, that’s what companies pay me for), but I feel like the general media (and that includes me) are really missing something.

That “something” is the actual play that’s happening here… and there’s nothing wrong with saying “I don’t know.”