Elon, Let Us All Help Free Twitter

Instead of a savior, we should see Musk as a leader, leading by example.

I’ll be the first to admit that my man crush on Elon Musk just went up multiple notches. The man just put his money where his mouth is in a way that few leaders in my lifetime have ever done.

Even if his bid to free Twitter from the nudging oligarchy ultimately fails, it’s a heroic act to recognize Twitter’s true value to society and to be willing to risk so much of his personal wealth to try to unlock that value.

Yes, I do realize that it can be argued that Musk himself is an oligarch. The word oligarch derives from the ancient Greek words oligos (few) and archein (rule). As the richest man in the world, Musk is certainly one of the few that rule.

That being said, he doesn’t seem to be particularly nudging. He doesn’t talk down to the rest of us in the same way that, for example, Bill Gates does. He doesn’t want to tell us what to do and what to think. He deserves the benefit of our doubts.

But Elon has a problem with Twitter.

The trouble is that what Elon (and many of the rest of us) want Twitter to be is at terminal odds with the realities of Twitter’s current advertising-driven business model. Advertisers cannot be allowed to dictate to Twitter what is acceptable speech. “Free speech” and the “demands of advertisers” just don’t go together. They’re like oil and water. They can’t be combined.

Closely related to Twitter’s appeasement-of-advertisers problem is the fact that Musk has to finance this deal with major investment banks, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays. The banks have committed to $13B of debt issuance as well as $12.5B in margin loans against Musk’s Tesla stock.

Bloomberg’s Matt Levine estimates that servicing Twitter’s debt will likely cost Twitter about $1B per year. Bloomberg estimates that 2022 EBITDA is likely to be $1.43B. It doesn’t seem out of the question that a Musk-run Twitter will produce even less EBITDA since Musk has said that he doesn’t care about making money with Twitter. More than likely, the majority of Twitter’s cash flows are going to have to go to servicing Twitter’s debts.

Taken together, the need to appease advertisers and the need to service debt is going to make it very difficult for Musk to turn Twitter into the free speech temple that he says he wants it to be.

I’ve got a solution for him. He should crowd-fund the money through a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) to pay back the financiers. My guess is that it would take $20B to get Twitter completely out of debt and beholden to no one but its owners. Twitter today has over 200 million users. If every user “bought” $100 worth of Twitter, that’s $20B.

I’m sure that plenty of other free-speech absolutists out there would be willing to join Musk in putting their money where their mouth is. That could easily bring down the cost of being a “member-owner” of Twitter to $50 or less.

The reason that I think a DAO is the right vehicle for crowd-sourcing control of Twitter is because of the transparency factor. Musk himself has said that he wants to make the algorithms that Twitter uses more transparent. He said that he wants to make them open source. I couldn’t agree more. As I wrote back in January of this year, we need Data at the Speed of Trust. Transparency is at the heart of digital trust today.

I’m sure that these ideas are not new to Musk himself. He’s been working for decades to bring down centralized control of the economy. He’s disrupted centralized control of banking with PayPal, energy with Tesla, and space with SpaceX. Now he’s out to disrupt centralized control of speech and narrative with Twitter.

We shouldn’t be looking at Musk as our savior. We should be looking at him as a leader who is leading by example. I hope that once he closes on Twitter, he will give us all the chance to join him in putting our money where our mouths are in support of free speech.

In the meantime, we can enjoy the Elon élan. He is clearly an investor who sees investing as a way to influence the future – a way to create a “future worth getting excited about.” I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time now, and I’m relishing this moment of leadership from Elon Musk.