There are reasons to be optimistic about Musk's Twitter, if that comes to be. #
For one thing, none of the CEOs of Twitter going back to the beginning were natural bloggers. Musk is.#
When he was joining the board, I thought that was good because having a user on the board of a tech company is pretty unusual, and would be a good thing. Having a user as the CEO -- even better. #
Also there's too much religion in the UI of Twitter. Musk's ideas have been pragmatic. On the right path, imho.#
I am a customer of Tesla and StarLink, and both companies appear to be run well, and what they do is imho harder than running Twitter, which basically is the kind of service the tech industry is good at running.#
My main concern with Musk as the new owner of Twitter is that Trump will be back. I think it was proven beyond any doubt that Twitter can be grossly misused, and the company has to be ready to stop its service from being used in such a harmful way.#
Free speech is not an absolute -- the old Shouting fire in a crowded movie theater idea. Trump used Twitter to organize the overthrow of the US government and almost succeeded at it.#
I am also concerned that Musk will curtail the Twitter API, which is incredibly useful and under-exploited by the company and its users. I've built a lot of tech on top of the API, and would miss it if it were gone.#
BTW, I am a shareholder of Twitter and would prefer to continue to hold my stock. I was holding it as a long-term investment. Not interested in selling it at this time. Was hoping for a much larger return. #
Just some early morning thoughts on this topic, sure to be much discussed. #
A reader asked why I was concerned that Musk might curtail the Twitter API. Basically, because I've seen things like that happen over and over in Silicon Valley.#
I've been through this before with Apple. When Steve Jobs returned he shut down Mac internet devs, by bundling open source versions of what our products did, somewhat. Enough to kill our markets. #
When a new owner comes in and finds projects with serious staff that aren't generating revenue and have no clear purpose, they at least think about dropping them. Great example, again with Steve Jobs -- not that I disagree with what he cut, he just made huge cuts in some things that were really good and unique for a tech company, like their internal library. Most of what he cut were boondoggles, some of which competed with independent products that were better than Apple's. In other words they were spending money to hold back the market. Foolish. #
FWIW, I warned in 2017 that Twitter's price was too low, and that a Republican backer like Shelly Adelson or the Koch Brothers could buy it and make it run like Fox News. It's a good thing they didn't because for sure Trump would still be using Twitter to organize his coup.#
People who responded said it'd never happen because Twitter's balance sheet was too weak to justify an acquisition. They missed that not all of Twitter's value shows up on its balance sheet.#
Last update: Thursday April 14, 2022; 9:51 PM EDT.
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