For $1B he could make an exact twitter clone, and he could probably do it for much less than that. You might say, yes, but he's paying for the brand, and no one would use his clone. He could pay for a flood of advertising and other promotions to get people to switch. He could pay 42,000,000 people $1000 each to switch to his twitter clone.
Frankly, Musk could pull this off and it might be his plan anyway. Twitter has a lot of tech and very talented people.. not to mention the existing user base. But Musk has the star appeal to draw in famous users and make it at least somewhat appealing to the masses who want to follow along.
The social media space is stagnant and looking for change, but as yet nobody can match Meta’s $55/user in ARPU. Maybe Musk can get there.
Lol the only people who would join Musk's social network are Tesla investors, crypto enthusiasts, and people who've already joined gettr, parler, truth social, etc..
Also having the head of a new social network be someone who is notorious for being a dick is not the best way to build a healthy community.
I think he can. I see twitter to be a much better platform than FB and based on my observation engagement in the platform is only getting better. With politics, tech, markets as hot topics as ever TWTR could be worth much more under Elon.
It's not the tech that makes Twitter interesting, it's the already established networking power. You can clone the tech but you can't clone the social part.
You don't pay for Twitter's infrastructure, you pay for it's >210M daily active users. What it cost, in dollars and years, to replicate that? Some $200 per Twitter DAU is not extravagant, 13 years of current average revenue per user, one which could (but doesn't have to) greatly appreciate by pressing on monetization, it's at like Facebook 2014 levels.
When Facebook paid 1 and 14 billion-s for Instagram and WhatsApp, it wasn't for the handful of employees and the codebases, but the userbases with snowballing network effects. They tried replicating TikTok with Lasso and Snapchat with Poke and Slingshot, but none of that went anywhere. It's not easy to build a large userbase, and as far as I can see from social media history, all the large ones were first to get some steam in whatever niche-s they occupy. Leveraging their 3 other networks Facebook's able to bolt-on competitors to steal some inertia from the snowballs (Stories which is a larger business then Snap by now, and Reels which is seemingly going somewhere), but building a standalone social media for competing with an existing incumbent is just bloody hard. They're displaceable, but there's always been something novel when social media market shares went to or grew into a new app.
Twitter's not quite snowballing at this point, but it has entrenched itself in some important roles and niches (namely of a town square and an official outlet) that are hard to displace. It would take time, effort and significant propositions to outgrow Twitter's significance. Alternatively, one can sell a quarter (or a third once Twitter's board or shareholders refuse and he bumps the offer) of it's Tesla shares - or borrow against the whole - and buy the existing network, go from there.
A network effect is one of many forms of licenses to print money which can't just be replaced. Like a brand, any decently sized game dev team can probably clone Call of Duty or EA Sports games, won't get them the licenses to print money that Activision (soon Microsoft) and EA hold. You can make the best perfumes, it doesn't buy you Coco Chanel's money printer.
I doubt he sees it as the best use of his time to build a new social media website up from scratch - I'd be pretty unconfident in such a project's likelihood to see great success, anyway.
