Musk to charge for twitter?

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
1

Elon Musk suggests Twitter could charge commercial and government accounts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/business/elon-musk-twitte…

Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive who plans to acquire Twitter, suggested on Wednesday that it was possible the social network would charge certain users fees in the future.

“Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users,” he wrote in a tweet.

A few days ago I posted an interview with NYU Business School professor Scott Galloway. He pointed out that GM spends $2 Billion per year on traditional advertising, Tesla has built a stronger brand on the strength of the nonsense Elon Musk posts for free on twitter. If twitter started charging Elon and Tesla $1MM/month for access to the platform, I expect he’d pay it.

Here are the top 10 twitter users with the most followers:

https://www.tweetbinder.com/blog/top-twitter-accounts/

Barack Obama @BarackObama 131,4M
Justin Bieber @justinbieber 114,4M
Katy Perry @katyperry 108,9M
Rihanna @rihanna 106,2M
Cristiano Ronaldo @Cristiano 99,4M
Elon Musk @elonmusk 90,5M
Taylor Swift @taylorswift13 90,3M
Ariana Grande @ArianaGrande 85,3M
(until she deleted the account – Pete Davidson problems)
Lady Gaga @ladygaga 84,5M
Narendra Modi @narendramodi 78,2M
Ellen DeGeneres @TheEllenShow 77,7M

Obama and Modi probably wouldn’t pay, but most of the entertainers would pay up for the marketing value, just like Musk.

There probably isn’t enough of a bone here to make twitter worth $44 Billion, but it’s clearly a revenue stream current management hasn’t tapped.

intercst

2

but most of the entertainers would pay up for the marketing value, just like Musk.

I doubt it. They have plenty of other ways to reach their fans: instagram, tik-tok, YouTube, tumblr, Flickr, and lots of others.

And frankly, I’m not sure using “Musk” and “Tesla” as the prototypical potential payers is appropriate. Musk is unique, certainly, and Tesla is one of the very few “oh wow” products that is self-generating in terms of interest. The iPhone is another, but after that?

I think what Musk misses is that the celebrities generate a large portion of the “casual users.” Take away the Kardashians, Obamas, Trumps, etc. and you severely impact the usage stats, and not in a good way.

Maybe he’s got it all right and I’ve got it all wrong, but I think Musk has a lot to learn about running a communications platform.

13 Likes
3

but most of the entertainers would pay up for the marketing value, just like Musk.

I doubt it. They have plenty of other ways to reach their fans: instagram, tik-tok, YouTube, tumblr, Flickr, and lots of others.

That’s also a little inconsistent with his stated goal of relaxing content moderation on the site. The various twitter brigades love going after celebrities and entertainers, and have driven bunches of them off the site over the years. Those departures are often very visible and covered in other media, which reinforces Twitter’s reputation as having a lot of unpleasantness. It’s hard to imagine that celebs would pay very much for the privilege of being on a more loosely moderated Twitter while free, larger, and supposedly less hostile platforms are available as alternatives.

Albaby

4 Likes
4

Twitter is simply not unique enough technology to make it a member-paid platform.

Think of ALL the other social media platforms - don’t you think that if a member-paid model could work, one of them would have already done so (or tried and failed to do so) by now?

Another existing social media company could easily replace twitter if they started to charge. IG or Snapchat could rather easily add functionality that looks very similar to twitter while keeping access free.

Hawkwin
Who thinks if twitter starts to charge, it will quickly become the next MySpace - still around but supplanted by FB, twitter, IG, etc.

1 Like
5

Maybe he’s got it all right and I’ve got it all wrong, but I think Musk has a lot to learn about running a communications platform.

As an Elon Musk fan, I can state with some certainty that he has never succeeded in running anything involving communications. Customer and internal communications at Tesla are pretty much the only bad part of owning a Tesla.

Tesla had boards like the Fool for a long time. They were overrun with trolls and never particularly useful.

Tesla has owners clubs, but they get no useful support from Tesla.

The general approach at Tesla is exactly what you would expect of an excellent engineering organization. Oh, look, a customer experienced a problem. Yup, we should fix that so it can never happen again… Eventually it’s fixed and life is better for everybody… Except the customers who had the problem never get taken care of. Usually. Not even to tell them their problem is being addressed at some level.

It’s not that very many customers get screwed, but there’s really no effort to make them happy or whole, even though Tesla clearly recognizes that it was Tesla’s fault.

I expect the same with Twitter. There will be a bunch of technical fixes that make some serious problems go away. But the emergence of a smoothly functioning “town square” where people are free to be heard and truth is respected and amplified over lies? Not going to happen. He’ll give up after a year or so saying that this effort is much harder than anyone could have predicted. But meanwhile the service will be better for the technical changes at least. Though overrun by mad dogs.

It will end up better for Elon, but not many others.

-IGU-
(Note: had 4 Tesla vehicles over the course of 8 years and no serious communications problems.)

1 Like
6

Hawkwin
Who thinks if twitter starts to charge, it will quickly become the next MySpace - still around but supplanted by FB, twitter, IG, etc.

==========================================================

I think you missed the key point - from the OP:

Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive who plans to acquire Twitter, suggested on Wednesday that it was possible the social network would charge certain users fees in the future.

“Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users,” he wrote in a tweet.

Jaak

7

Obama and Modi probably wouldn’t pay, but most of the entertainers would pay up for the marketing value, just like Musk.

There probably isn’t enough of a bone here to make twitter worth $44 Billion, but it’s clearly a revenue stream current management hasn’t tapped.

intercst

Having a financial interest in a platform tends to improve the content of the contributions to that platform. In other words, a fee, even a very small fee that attaches financial responsibility to the poster tends to get rid of imposters and spam bots and reduces the number of morons that are posting.

I pay for Youtube, just to remove commercials. I would consider a fee for twitter, especially if I knew that I could limit my communications to other twitter users that paid a fee.

Same for the Fool. I found the paid boards to be pretty full of useless newbies some years ago, that may have changed and i might ought to try them again. But, when we had to pay to get in any board, the content was quite good.

Cheers
Qazulight

1 Like
8

Having a financial interest in a platform tends to improve the content of the contributions to that platform. In other words, a fee, even a very small fee that attaches financial responsibility to the poster tends to get rid of imposters and spam bots and reduces the number of morons that are posting.
…
Same for the Fool. I found the paid boards to be pretty full of useless newbies some years ago, that may have changed and i might ought to try them again. But, when we had to pay to get in any board, the content was quite good.

Not only did we have to pay a small annual sum, we were comped that fee when we provided content to the boards that were of benefit. I know that I felt valued as a community member, having that small annual fee comped, and worked much harder than the pittance waived fee merited. That old community is hard to see for all the noise of the free boards, but the glimpses I see is probably why I still try to love this community. At some point my loyalty will finally recede to too small an amount to keep me here. I post here so much less than before, no doubt in part because I no longer have such a need to ask questions, but the desire to share what I have learned, over and over, is disappearing. This is TMF’s mistake in removing the “non-financial” boards, boards which kept those of us who no longer need the financial boards coming back. It’s pretty easy to just google the questions I still have, and I confess when that google produces a TMF article, I skip over that ad disguised as an article. They for the most part just continue to go from a disrupter that showed people they could do their financials themselves, to the very thing they used to loudly disdain…thinking for others for a fee.

I guess in some ways this is the clearest sign that I am getting old. Nostalgia for something that no longer exists.

IP

4 Likes