“Hello everybody. Nice to meet you. I am thrilled to be here and believe that the long-term potential of Twitter is immense ”. Elon Musk in the Italian night had his first meeting with employees of the social network of which he became the sole owner for 44 billion dollars. Sixty minutes of questions and answers. Worn out two weeks after becoming the head of the company.
Enough to allow Elon Musk to talk to his employees about the company’s future plans. And to set the record straight from the start, optimism aside: either you become the best of all, or nothing is excluded, “not even failure”. To avoid this, Twitter needs to be rethought. A way must be found to make the company profit. Twitter has to become something different. And the details are not lacking in the picture traced by Musk in the meeting of which The Verge obtained and published the contents.
The Twitter coffers and the specter of bankruptcy
In the sixty minutes with the Twitter team, Musk certainly did not lack the clarity of the message. On the financial state of the company he did not mince words: “We absolutely have to bring more money to the cash desk than we spend. If we don’t do this and the cash flow is severely negative, bankruptcy cannot be ruled out. It is a priority. We can’t scale to 1 billion users and suffer massive losses along the way. It is not feasible. But I don’t think it will happen ”.
The request is for everyone to work. Work hard. Work in presence. No more smart working: “It is necessary to reduce communication difficulties. I want to be clear. If people don’t come back to the office when they are able to, they can’t stay in the company. End of the story”.
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The need for subscriptions, the recession
Musk was very clear on the economic difficulties of the social. And on the adverse macroeconomic situation, which is hitting the social media industry hard. “I think it is necessary to increase the subscriptions. The reason why I have such extreme urgency when it comes to subscriptions is that we are heading, I believe, into a severe recession. And it can be seen in virtually every company that fires. It’s not just Twitter that fires. Advertising was hit hard by the recession. And this puts Twitter, in perspective, in a very difficult situation from the point of view of revenues ”.
Again: “There will probably be a year or two of severe recession which, once again, will hit us disproportionately. If we work well, we will overcome this moment. We will not die “.
“Only the paranoid survive”
Musk recalled the other times he had to go through recessions with his companies: “I went through the recession of 2000, 2001 and 2008-9. I’m a little paranoid about bankruptcies during recessions. I have post traumatic stress disorder from recession, after keeping X and PayPal alive during the 2000 recession and keeping Tesla alive during the 2009 recession. It is worth mentioning that in 2009 General Motors and Chrysler are both fail. Tesla no, despite being an electric vehicle startup. It was extremely difficult to keep us alive in 2009. And the reason we managed to survive is partly paranoia. It’s like Andy Gross’s famous statement: “Only the paranoid survive”. Well, then we will be paranoid and survive ”.
A payment system
Already. But how? The first indication is about the future of Twitter as a payment system. Musk, who founded two payments startups (one is PayPal), began his climb in the 1990s in this sector: “I think there is an opportunity for transformation in payments,” he said at the opening of his speech. .
“And the payments are nothing more than the exchange of information. From an information point of view, there isn’t a big difference between sending a direct message and sending a payment. They are basically the same. In principle, you can use a direct messaging service for payments. It is a direction we intend to follow: to allow people on Twitter to send money to any part of the world instantly and in real time ”.
Twitter like a bank account. Not even excluding the hypothesis of being able to send Twitter “debit cards”. A step at a time. To become what Musk calls a sort of “people’s financial institution”, a payment system that allows “sending money, deposits, and interest on deposit accounts”.
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An account, linked to an ecommerce
The question of the Twitter account and payments, Musk adds, is linked to the ability to buy on the platform. Something that “goes hand in hand with payments”. Because “if you have a Twitter balance or money in your Twitter account, it’s very easy to buy items. It is therefore a natural consequence of an effective payment system, which facilitates the purchase of objects ”.
A video platform, model TikTok
Another element underlined by Musk is the need to focus on videos. Mode became very popular with the success of Youtube first, and then TikTok. “Today, content creators can’t publish the videos they want. And they cannot monetize them ”. It’s still. “These are not very complicated things. They are quite basic. We’re not trying to make YouTube fail, but I’m saying: do we really need to give YouTube loads of free traffic? Maybe not. So, at least let’s give creators a chance to put their video on Twitter and earn the same amount they would make on YouTube or TikTok, or whatever the case may be, or maybe a little more ”.
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Musk’s reference is that Twitter videos are there at the moment, but they are often shared by other platforms. The most credited hypothesis by Musk at the moment is the reinstatement of Vine: “We should do what Vine did. Give the possibility to publish videos directly on Twitter and do it so that they are beautiful to look at ”.
Then a hint of the strategy. How to attract content creators to Twitter. Direct. Musk style. “Let’s take a bunch of content creators that we think are good on YouTube and say, ‘Hey, you want to consider putting your content on Twitter and we’re going to pay you 10% more than YouTube and see how it goes?’ “.
Sift through Twitter without necessarily being subscribed to Twitter
Another step concerns a change in part already made in the web version of the social network. But that Musk also wants on the app. That is, the possibility that you can download and read the contents on Twitter without being registered on the social network. “This is definitely a case where TikTok is so much better. Switching to TikTok and downloading the app is super easy. “
And he concludes: “And it doesn’t ask you to create a username or anything like that, unless you want to post video content. The same should apply to Twitter. People should be able to download the app, decide their interests and already have a a picture of the most interesting tweets on the chosen topics “.