Media & Entertainment

Don’t lose sleep over Elon Musk’s desire to build the next Twitter

Comment

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at the Axel Springer Award ceremony in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020. Tesla Inc. will be added to the S&P 500 Index in one shot on Dec. 21, a move that will ripple through the entire market as money managers adjust their portfolios to make room for shares of the $538 billion company. Photographer: Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Image Credits: Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz/Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Elon Musk tweeted this weekend that he is “giving serious thought” to building his own social media platform.

“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” the billionaire serial entrepreneur who is CEO of Tesla and Space X tweeted. “What should be done?”

If your blood pressure spiked reading these tweets, you’re not alone. But let’s take a deep breath. We probably won’t see an app called DogeSociælX any time soon.

Musk has a history of tweeting absurd memes, thoughts and even material information about Tesla, then feigning shock when U.S. regulators react with more than a raised eyebrow. However, when it comes to Musk actually following through on his wacky Twitter ideas, his track record isn’t great.

This isn’t the first time that Musk has fantasized publicly about his dreams of being the next Jack Dorsey (though maybe he’s closer to a Zuck?).

After journalists criticized Musk for his questionable Tesla management choices in 2018, he vowed to launch a website called Pravda, the Russian word for “truth,” which is also the name of an historic Russian communist newspaper. Musk’s website would allow the public to rate journalists, editors and media outlets on their “core truth” and “credibility scores.” Thankfully, this idea did not come to fruition, but as all journalists know, Twitter already functions very well as a vehicle to make you aware when people don’t agree with you.

When Musk’s Twitter-borne ideas do get off the ground, they have traditionally fallen far short of becoming the next SpaceX.

Also in 2018 — a big year for his antics — Musk announced his “new intergalactic media empire,” a comedy company called Thud (punctuated with an optional exclamation point). After Elon Musk was tapped to host SNL last year, I embarked on a Sisyphean journalistic task: I contacted all 13 former employees of Thud, Musk’s forgotten foray into comedy media.

No one was willing to talk to me on the record. Powered by former editors of The Onion, Thud flopped, and was then reduced to a conversation starter on a resume (former Theranos employees can relate). It’s no wonder that these writers and designers didn’t want to revisit Thud, which its minimalist website now calls “short-lived” and “aptly named.”

Initially, Musk funneled $2 million into Thud, but he left the company abruptly, leaving its editors with no plan to monetize the project.

“Making a swift transition from being a billionaire-backed project to an independent media company is… You know,” editor Cole Bolton told The Verge at the time.

Given his history of making outlandish statements online for the fun of it, there’s little need to panic about Musk’s sudden interest in creating a social media empire (this one isn’t even intergalactic!). Plus, even when there’s a big name behind a new platform, there’s no guarantee it’ll take off. Donald Trump’s own new app, Truth Social, may feel like it’s poised to become a mainstream 4chan, but weeks after launch, we’re still 976,985th on the waitlist. And once you’re admitted, the party doesn’t appear to be too exciting (unless you’re into “hot chicks golfing“).

https://twitter.com/kelsaywhat/status/1508185434844766220

Even if Musk were to develop his own social media platform, he wouldn’t have the same level of reach he has on Twitter. He boasts 79.4 million followers, landing him solidly in the top 10 most-followed users on the site, beaten out only by figures like Barack Obama and Justin Bieber. But unlike Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, Musk leverages his following to make Hitler jokes and compare Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal to Joseph Stalin. Notably, as Musk complains that he is not allowed to speak freely, these foul tweets were not removed by the platform; he deleted his Hitler meme himself, and the dig at Agrawal is still up.

This isn’t a free speech issue; it’s just Musk’s distaste for any form of regulation. It’s doubtful that Musk’s nearly 80 million followers would migrate over to his theoretical new platform, but even if they did, the SEC could still hold Musk accountable for whatever insider information he shares.

Musk’s most powerful tool has always been Twitter, and like Trump, he doesn’t seem to gain anything by trying to start a new company that the SEC would still monitor anyway.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about the threat posed by egomaniacal men in power who are wealthy enough to make their fever dreams realities.

After all, Musk seems to be a bit better at business than Trump. But sometimes, Musk’s outbursts on Twitter do nothing but create polarizing, charged dialogue, and we forget that even though Musk’s tweets can move markets, sometimes, they simply just fall with a thud.

More TechCrunch

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur