Tangent/Thesis: Musk Will Be Hamstrung By Lenders; Unable To Change Much At Twitter…

I might ask this David Z. Morris gent why we didn’t hear him complain about Rupert Murdoch, or Michael Bloomberg. . . but because I agree with him, and I did complain about each of those billionaires controlling major media markets of the past. . . I’ll just ride shotgun on this one. Heh.

There are few Americans still alive who remember the time when a man named McCormick controlled most of what most Chicagoans read at the end of the 19^th Century. . . but it is true: that was a city; this is. . . pretty close to. . . global.

In any event, here is the Morris thesis, over at Coindesk:

. . .The ultimate takeaway is that a service like Twitter shouldn't have a single point of failure, including a takeover by a slightly unhinged billionaire.

Many experts at least in theory support a shift from centrally controlled “platforms” like Twitter and toward open “protocols” that allow for mobility and interaction across platforms, the same way email and RSS feeds do for other digital communication today. . . .

Of course, because he writes for a crypto-evangelist outlet, he goes on to write some fairly starry-eyed / wishful thinking about making Twitter a consortium / collective like a DAO. Won’t happen -- the majority stockholder(s), to say nothing of the $28 billion lenders — won’t vote to zero out the overall $44 billion investment.

But it is fun to think about. [Perhaps a tangent, to this tangent, for another day: Jack Dorsey also made these "collective" noises, as he exited from day-to-day control at Twitter, and encouraged Musk to do something like a DAO. But it is a little rich, that each of them took in literally billions of investors' capital, only then to say. . . "well, maybe we should dump it all, and make it a zero." That in my experience is classic Ayn Rand thinking: no sense of owing an investor. . . anything. Odd.]

In any event, Le Infant Terrible Musk has no idea what a content moderation wormhole he’s about to fall into — but the lenders are likely to effectively force him to keep the current status quo at Twitter (i.e., Trump and Trump-like: remain unable to tweet).

So it is likely to remain… a very expensive snow-globe, on Musk’s office desktop.

Or a walled in garden if one prefers a London metaphor.

But. . . it is Musk, so it will be. . . chaos, walking. Onward, grinning. . . .

नमस्ते