Play Dumb Games, Win Dumb Prizes.
Twitter is a dumb game. Except for Elon Musk, who used use the game to enhance his cult like status, helping fuel Tesla’s stock price, which in turn helped him borrow enough money to buy Twitter.
The most popular reactions on Twitter about Elon Musk buying Twitter were, predictably, very dumb.
I like a lot of Elon’s public proclamations but unless he is serious about DGAF’ing Twitter’s economics these types of dumb tweets will always be the hallmark of the Dumb Game. And Elon is putting up $33 Billion in equity and probably will close the deal with equity partners so don’t hold your breath.
You win the dumb game of Twitter with the simplest distillations of current events targeted exclusively at people who agree with you. That’s why people tweet, that’s why people read tweets. Perhaps open sourcing the algorithm changes that, but I don’t think Elon Musk bought Twitter so people would use it less – the guy fucking loves Twitter!
Casino owners want people at the tables, bars want dudes ordering shots, the Government legalizes weed because they need the tax money. They only want you to be a responsible drinker, gambler or smoker so that you can keep drinking, gambling and smoking. They need you as a customer, which you won’t be if you are dead or sober.
Twitter is a casino, bar & dopamine den wrapped into one. Yeah, it has a new owner. But he has the same incentives as the old boss even if for different reasons – get people to use Twitter. The Left and the Right both perfectly hue to the same hegemony on culture war issues. Anand Girdharadas is way too smart to believe half of the dumb tweets he posts – but he wants the RTs! You think all these right wingers talking about how much they love Elon are going to stick by him when he starts extolling the virtues of climate change?
Business is just understanding incentives. And in the news media business, the incentive is to have the cleverest or most troll or boldest take that aligns exactly within your audience pre-designed preferences.
I like Elon Musk, a lot. But he’s just buying a Casino he isn’t building one.
Maybe he moves the crap tables, lowers the rake at the sports book. But the rules of the game are set in stone folks.