A Tale of Two Twitters - Elon's A Genius / Elon's a Moron

If you have followed the saga around Twitter/X since Elon Musk bought it last year, you know one thing:

"I think Twitter's finally done," Twitter's finally done!

"Elon Musk bought Twitter. Is it better now or he's ruined it?"

"The product is dramatically better. He's innovated the product more in the first year than it had for a long time,"

I mean, Twitter is amazing. Well, that's because Elon is the greatest entrepreneur on the planet.

"You heard from Friedberg to suspend disbelief that the greatest entrepreneur on the planet, running two of the most important companies, is not more qualified to run Twitter,"

Or he's a complete idiot.

"Elon is a fucking dumbass!"

To be a curious and intellectually honest person, in today's world of X, is like living in a tale of two cities or a tale of two X's. In one, X is Gotham being run by the Joker.

In another, it is Eden on its way to a free speech utopia where we can solve the ills of humanity and civic discourse.

I am Carly Riley and in light of the one year anniversary of Elon purchasing the app X and a slew of recent reports saying that advertisers have newly pulled out of the platform, we are going to take an honest look at what is happening on X. But first I do have to say thank you so much to our sponsors Ledger, Web3Sense and OpenSea. Let's hear it for them:

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Okay, the main problem with the conversation around X is of course Elon Musk. It feels like everyone has an agenda, because on the one side, you do have a lot of people in media who do seem to really, really hate Elon Musk. And that makes it feel like you may not get honest reports about how X itself is doing if the reporters have some sort of ideological beef against the founder.

On the flip side, we know that Elon and his many sycophants hate the media and distrust everything they say, whether they should or not, and therefore have their own agenda when it comes to pumping up how amazing the X platform is.

For example: the media reported endlessly and breathlessly about how Threads was going to be the Twitter killer; describing the platform's imminent downfall with headlines like "Twitter traffic is tanking as Meta's Threads hits 100 million users." Then the Elon stance responds to that by acting like this is all just a broad conspiracy on the part of these news outlets to try and shut Elon and Twitter out because Twitter is a threat to their business model since it actually promotes and supports free speech.

And you'll have outlets like Zero Hedge say things like thi: "Trying corporate media outlets have been waging an all-out assault on social media platform X, because they perceive it as an existential threat to their ideological narrative control and the interest of their overlords, due to its emphasis on free speech," it continues on. "According to Bloomberg data, Twitter Killer, appearing in headlines erupted across corporate media, a concerted effort by the status quo against Musk."

Which, sure, maybe, or, and just go with me here, the largest social media company on the planet, Meta, launched a competitive product, to Twitter, at a time when Twitter was, frankly, vulnerable, because a lot was in flux after Musk took it over. And 100 million users did sign up for threads very quickly, one of the most quickly adopted apps of all time, and reporters need engagement and clicks, and so they said things like "Twitter killer" because it made headlines.

Now look, there are times where I believe that the media does conspire against certain individuals. For example, in the presidential election here in the United States, Bernie Sanders, I believe, was conspired against, and network heads did tell reporters that they had to cover Bernie in certain ways and make him seem less legitimate when he was running against Hillary. That kind of stuff does happen very occasionally. But by and large, media is just reporters trying to get clicks on headlines. And Twitter killer was a fairly reasonable way to describe this app in a way that would also generate clicks.

And yet, those Twitter killer headlines have so far turned out to be pretty wrong, which is why trust has eroded in the mainstream media because we were all bombarded with those headlines and then what was being prophesied didn't really turn out to be true.

So again, it begs the question, how is X really doing? Well look, part of this was precipitated because there's been a slew of new headlines recently talking about how advertisers are pulling off of the platform. And that is true. Advertisers are pulling out, and the advertising situation for Twitter is not good. The New York Times is reporting that they may lose $75 million in revenue based on these new advertisers that have pulled out.

They have no reason to question that number. Who knows exactly what it looks like? The point is, Elon and Linda Yakarino, who is the CEO now, they are failing on the advertiser side with companies like Apple and Disney pulling the ads that they had been running on the platform.

But you would also be forgiven if you were like, wait, Disney and Apple were still advertising on X? I feel like all I've heard for the last 12 months is how all the advertisers had already pulled out of the company because of headlines like this from June of 2023, just five months ago, where it said, "Twitter's US ad sales plunged 59% as woes continue."

Well, as it turns out, a number of advertisers had actually returned to the platform after Linda Yakarino took over as CEO. But that didn't really get covered. And this is part of the crux of the problem, which is that the media will endlessly cover when advertisers pull out or when there is bad news for the platform when it comes to traffic and engagement. But they don't seem to report the counter narrative.

They're not reporting when the advertisers actually come back after Linda Yakarino stepped in as CEO.

In any case, this most recent exodus by advertisers is connected to the sense that there is antisemitism on the platform in general. Elon and Twitter are currently suing Media Matters for a report that claimed that some of the advertisers' content was being featured next to anti-Semitic content and accusations about Musk himself being anti-Semitic.

But here's what I know. If advertisers can get eyeballs and value by advertising on Twitter, they will be back within six months.

Kanye literally tweeted, "I'm going to go Defcon 5 on the Jews." And Adidas is still selling his shoes.

"Instead of holding Kanye accountable for his behaviors, Adidas just kept throwing more and more money at him,".

If the advertising works, companies will make their big public showy display about how they've left the platform, and then they will quietly come back on within the next couple of months.

Now there is still an open question about how much advertising on X actually works. As somebody who has run ads on Twitter, it's never been a great experience or never been as good of an experience as compared with some of these other social media sites. But clearly companies felt it was still worth it to some degree.

And certainly a large part of all of this is traffic and eyeballs on the platform. If brands feel they can get in front of the people they want to get in front of by using Twitter, they will do it.

Which brings us to this question of traffic. Once again, Elon will tell you that things on the platform are going great. NFL views on X are up 41% because as Linda Jacarino puts it, "It all happens on X."

Tucker Carlson is getting billions of views on his show here compared with the measly millions he would have gotten over at Fox News, etc. etc. Meanwhile, the media of course is telling you the exact opposite. One recent Axios headline says, "X usage plummets in Musk's first year,".

Mashable ran the headline, "Twitter/X is losing daily active users."

CEO Linda Jacarino confirmed it.

The truth is, it's really hard to know how things are actually going on the traffic front. First of all, there are a million different metrics you could use to measure this. And second of all, now that X is a private company, it doesn't have to report a lot of this data. So it's gate capped behind Linda and Elon.

Now Linda said at a conference that there are 225 million daily active users, which would mean it was down by about 5% from this time last year. But then Linda said, "Well, actually it's somewhere between 200 and 250 million active users depending on the day, which means it might actually only be down by like 3%."

Elon says that it has overtaken Instagram and Facebook by a significant margin in driving traffic through Google. And, depending on where you get your number, Twitter is either the fifth or seventh most visited site on the internet in the world.

So look, using something like SimilarWeb, which compares traffic across different sites and looks at traffic on a website over time, it does seem like traffic to the platform is down a bit year over year, which is what a lot of outlets are reporting. But it was also true that traffic on the platform spiked when Elon first took over about a year ago.

So the numbers from a year ago may be artificially or unusually high. My feeling is that given everything, given all of the bad press, given all of the outrageous tweeting that Elon has done, given that Elon fired 80% of the team at Twitter when he took over, it's actually somewhat impressive to me how much the traffic numbers on the platform have held up over the last year.

Yes, things are down maybe as much as by 15 million users, which is a lot of people. But again, the platform is being declared dead while it is somewhere probably between the fifth and seventh most visited website on the internet.

And there's another piece of this, which is we hear a lot about how people are going to leave the platform, but so many of them don't. "The point is it has gotten so bad on Twitter that many users have announced they're leaving forever. But you know what's weird? For the most part, we haven't,".

Ya haven't. We're all still addicted to the bird.

And another interesting fact is that time spent on Twitter is higher than time spent on Instagram, Facebook, Threads, or Reddit on any given page visit. In fact, people tend to spend, rounding up, about two minutes on threads for any given visit while they spend 11 minutes on X on any given visit. And that's a pretty big difference that Twitter does deserve credit for.

So if Twitter can keep this up and admittedly make some improvements to the experience for advertisers, I imagine advertisers will be back on the platform in the next 12 months, if not sooner. And while advertisers coming back depends on traffic staying high, both advertisers coming back and traffic staying high depend on the user experience.

And here again, you have sort of a mixed bag. I know a lot of creators who are really happy with the way that Twitter has been treating creators and the monetization program that they've initiated, even if some of the more recent payments were lower than they had been previously.

On the other hand, I have people on my feed who are complaining about how terrible their 'For You' feed has gotten, saying things like: "I'm done with the 'For You' Twitter feed. I'm sick of reporting, blocking, hiding and blocking every damn tweet I make", with a screenshot of how there are a ton of bots underneath every post this person was making.

And again, people are complaining about the experience, but most people are staying. Kara Swisher is an interesting example. I love Kara Swisher. She did an amazing job covering the open AI saga, which I primarily followed through her on Twitter. And she would say things like: "I'm only using Twitter for this because it was easier for AI news at speed for now, but Elon's still heinous. And so I got to blow this popsicle stand. You can see whatever I follow with on Threads or Pivot Pod", which to me had made it seem like she wasn't going to be covering things on Twitter anymore.

She was going to be covering on Threads.

But of course you continue to cover everything on Twitter and continue to tweet fully. And I get her point is that there are certain things Twitter is still better at, you know, just this quick news at speed kind of thing. And yet the data showing that people spend more time on Twitter when they're on it than any other platform would suggest that it's good for more than just a quick hit AI news at speed experience.

Personally, I really loved the user experience on Twitter when it came to the open AI saga, but I have had other points in time, even recently, where I really have felt like the experience has been poor, where I have gotten a lot of bots on my replies more than usual.

Frankly, I think it's too early to really tell where this is all going to go. I respect the fact that Elon is somebody who wants to move very quickly to, to use a cliché here, move fast and break things. I actually respect the fact that he has maintained a certain kind of entrepreneurial spirit and this attitude of like ship a product. If it doesn't work, fix it, change it, ship it again, which can feel very messy if you're a user and can feel unprofessional, but is actually how you make a product best fastest.

Now I don't know if that's where we're going to end up. I'm very skeptical of the idea that we're going to get a super app here, but I actually don't mind that process of iteration that others seem to see as messy.

In any case, my primary takeaway in doing a bunch of research for this is that the Elon sycophants are petty and ideological and in some cases completely delusional. Elon is an asshole, who punches down really regularly in ways that I think are really unbecoming for somebody who is such an unbelievably talented entrepreneur.

And I know all the people who are looking at me like he's not actually talented. He didn't even start Tesla. Oh my God! Have you ever worked anywhere ever, and it doesn't, don't even at me with that stuff!

On the flip side, the people who absolutely hate Elon, as you can see, based on the reaction I was just having, are also fairly diluted. To act like because this man took over as CEO of Tesla and didn't literally found the company from day one, that he does not get a lot of credit for everything that has been built by Tesla, over the last decade, is insane, and shows a complete lack of understanding of like how businesses work and run and how integral a CEO, and leader, is, for an organization that grows as much as Tesla has on over the last 10 years, under Elon's leadership.

Only time will tell where it goes from here, but anyone who is prognosticating about exactly where Twitter is going - it's taking us to euphoria... It's going to hell... Doesn't know. Because the truth is the data isn't conclusive one way or another.

All right, folks, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please consider subscribing to the channel or commenting or liking. I really, really appreciate it. I would be curious.

I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of angry comments if I invite this, but I'm curious what you think of Twitter these days and what you think of Elon Musk.

And with that, have a great evening and I'll see you next time.

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