Scripting News: Wednesday, November 6, 2024

This quote is really from Ben Thompson's subscriber newsletter but via Dave Winer's blog highlighting this excerpt.

Ben Thompson wrote in his Stratechery newsletter:

"What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it's a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and in the intervening years the flight of advertisers from the platform has made it worth even less. From a Musk Inc. perspective, however, X played a pivotal role in ensuring that the incoming administration will do whatever Musk needs at the exact moment that SpaceX is gaining the capabilities to actually make a trip to Mars, if only the FAA in particular will give him the freedom to do so. That alone is almost certainly worth $44 billion to Musk!"

I do think most folks looked at Musk buying Twitter as a business move, but what he has done with it makes a lot more sense if you think of it like his personal media company. It is much easier to understand why you would throw a brand that had global name recognition like Twitter away overnight to replace it with X, if you just don't care at all about it as a company. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Musk owns X.