There is no more cursed phrase in Web dev than ‘pivot to video’ and so OF COURSE this is where Elon and his dipshitosphere of incompetent yes men are thinking of pushing Twitter.

Don’t get me wrong. It is the absolute height of macabre hilarity watching Elon squirm like an epileptic, drunken orangutan in quicksand as he tries to find some sort of viable business plan that can change the fundamental reality: he bought a company that danced back and forth across the line of profitability but at the time had cash in the bank. In doing so saddled it with so much crippling debt that even Bob Cratchit would say ‘yeah, let them fail’.

As a side note: part of the reason the debt is crippling is that Elon paid 2-3x what any observer thought Twitter was worth, and in doing so had to sell enough Tesla stock that Tesla is now more than 50% off it’s peak as well. Given that much of Elon’s wealth is still in Tesla stock, that means that a gobsmacking percentage of Elon’s personal fortune has simply evaporated in the last six months. He now owns a business that will need to come up with an extra $1B in revenue annually just to pay interest – a business that was just treading water before. Also, he’ll need to make up lost revenue from advertisers he spends his moments on the shitter jumping on Twitter to actively antagonize.

Also, Elon Musk is a business genius. So there’s that.

Anyway, Elon’s planning all sorts of crazy plans to dig himself out of this hole. This includes crazy ideas such as charging money for blue checkmarks and allowing Twitter to become an online bank.

But longform video seems to be where Elon wants to go, and Twitter currently allows short videos, which could in theory be expanded. And as befitting a business genius of his stature, he seems to be getting ideas on the business realities of the space from randos on Twitter, so you know this plan is super fleshed out and well-realized.

Some of Elon’s sycophants have suggested that that indeed is where Elon wants to go.

(Running parallel to this is Elon’s idea that Twitter should bring back Vine. This specifically is a bad idea for lots of reasons, the biggest being that Vine died for good reasons, and since then the Vine codebase has aged like a carton of milk in Death Valley)

Anyway, reasons why this is all very funny:

  1. Moderation. Elon Musk is abandoning the concept of moderation at a breakneck pace, utterly dismantling the internal mechanisms for moderating Twitter. But video requires EVEN MORE MODERATION. Like MASSIVELY MORE. Moderating video is massively more difficult and time-intensive than moderating text, and MUCH harder to do algorithmically. The companies that invest in video have enormous sweatshops of people whose entire job is to keep your Youtube feed from filling up with snuff films and child porn. Side note: Moderation problems were one of the reasons why Twitter killed Vine in the first place.
  2. Advertisers. The reason why Youtube works is because of advertisers. Advertising will become massively MORE important in a world where Twitter is centered on video, and that does not play nice with Elon’s declaration of war on advertisers, or insistence on the ‘free speech’ principles of allowing and promoting racist, antisemitic and homophobic content that advertisers abhor.
  3. Storage Space. At a time where Elon Musk is dismantling internal infrastructure to save a buck, video requires massively MORE infrastructure to store and distribute than 288 character text snippets.
  4. Technical Difficulty. It’s very good that Twitter has some tech here, but the real meat of video is Live Streaming, which is very difficult to do well, especially at the scale of more popular content creators. Can Twitter’s infrastructure handle distributing a live feed to a million people simultaneously? Because that’s the arena Elon’s saying he wants to play in if he wants a credible competitor.
  5. Entrenched Competition. Longform video currently has two established players – Youtube and Twitch – who also happen to be owned by companies with VERY deep pockets (Google and Amazon). Elon’s bright idea is to compensate creators more than those companies. Where he thinks he’ll get the cash to do that is ANYONE’s guess, but not even Elon has enough to do it if Youtube and Twitch decide to fight back.

Now, some have surmised that Elon can get around some of these issues if the focus of the work is to put content behind paywalls, thus allowing for example adult performers to make a buck on Twitter. Problems:

  1. OnlyFans already exists.
  2. If you think advertisers are fleeing now, just wait until you tell them that the future of Twitter is hardcore porn.

Could I be proven wrong? Sure. The Internet is still a place where a brilliant vision can surprise everyone and win the day. But is there a brilliant vision here? Nope. Just a billionaire flailing desperately as his fortune and wunderkind reputation evaporates.