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Po-tee-weet?
Most marketers ca n’t woolgather so big as to imagine a world where the name of their product is mentioned on every newscast , written about on every flyer , every advertizement , every sign and every e-mail signature .
That ’s the absurdly omnipresent baron of the Twitter brand . At first , it seemed like Musk was play a biz of chicken with the website . But no . The boxing glove are off . The hawks are out . When X ’s house iconchanged from a birdhouse to a steady theatre , you know that things were set out to get real . Twitter is n’t dying : It ’s numb .
tweet are posts . Retweets are reposts . The cute little plate icon ? Burn it . availability ? Diversity ? Eh . It does n’t weigh . That ’s not who we ’re building for over here . And in the process , the creative person formerly know as Twitter is burning so much brand recognition it ’ll make a third-year advertising executive director do terrible thing .
None of these things makes sense if you are playing the wrong game .
If you think Musk is ruining Twitter , then yeah , he is . That ’s because he ’s not in it for Twitter . He ’s in it for X , and the current lovers of the platform are verificatory damage .
Founders hump giving top - down takes . What ’s the total addressable market , how can it be segment in a way that hold money , and as the tide raise all boats , how hard can founders ride that CAC - to - LTV ratio motley metaphor into the supernova of their initial public offering ?
I ’ve been doing this long enough that I know what works . The problem is that every category - defining company of our geological era didn’thavean addressable market place : Theycreatedone .
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Seen through that lens , after a bout of pneumonia , a brace shots of whisky , and some squinting , perhaps X is starting to make a small bit of good sense .
Ripping the personality out of X is what Elon has to do to make it fit his dream : to have been right all along . He desire to be veracious about PayPal , which ultimately fail to solve all the world ’s banking problems . Then he got distracted by institutionalize stuff into distance , running a company literally into the basis ( and was tire about it ) and building an galvanising car or two .
Musk can be a raging sack of arrogance , and I dislike him for it , but he ’s right-hand about a few major thing . In 1999 , banking in the U.S. was a morass of misery , and globally , things were even bad . Some of the features of Norse cyberspace banks back then vocalise like witchcraft to American ear . And today I still ca n’t shift some money from my banking company account to my neighbor ’s without three panic attacks , two - thirds of a estimator skill degree , and some sort of digital intermediary .
Consumer banking was break 25 years ago , and it still is today . It ’s ludicrous that the bank could n’t get together and puzzle out this , so now we ’re all stuck with Square , Stripe , Plaid , and the 10,000 PayPal / Venmo / Cash App clones . “ Everyone is making money , ” you might squeal curtly - sightedly . Yeah , but whose money ? Why should it cost any money to move money from one place to another , ever ? For consumers , that ’s derisory . It mean that by the time you give your dollar to someone , it becomes 97 cents just by virtue of having changed script . If we were to send that one dollar back and forth enough times , it would evaporate .
If we have n’t been able to fix banking in 25 year , we may never be able to . And so the only way to “ gear up ” that organisation is to supercede it .
In that context , everything that ’s happened starts to make mother wit . Musk is n’t render to build a depository financial institution ; he ’s trying to supercede the integral banking organisation wholly .
Some of the pieces of that mystifier are start to come together . By creating a whole new banking system ( let ’s call it a chemical chain of blocks for the time being ; we ’ll recall of a better name later on ) , the technical school , transfer and trust layers are take care of .
Now you just need an absolutely absurdly huge substance abuser base to plop on top of that technology . That ’s where crypto so far has failed ; yes , it ’s easier than it was , but as long as tap - to - wage exists , the detrition to move to any sort of crypto thing is just too gamey .
So how do you get an absolutely enormous user base with as small dead weight as possible ? You purchase a site with an unreasonable telephone number of users who all amass around to share SMS - length messages with each other .
Musk has one of the magnanimous user Base in the human beings . There ’s just one problem : People are using the site . It would be much good if these users were n’t so unlike bank customers .
Everything that is n’t part of that mission needs to go . Twitter employees used to call themselves the Flock . And all of that needs to be rend out as well , because , well , we are n’t here for refinement . We are here to build a bank .
And all he needed was the users . And a fox to raid the henhouse .
