Elon Musk's on-again, off-again romance with Twitter has resumed with his tweet: "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to inventing X, the everything app”. With the speculation of Twitter becoming a "superapp", Elon Musk's Twitter chats from earlier this year are also doing the rounds on the internet.
In Exhibit H of the legal document, which the court decided to make public on September 28, Musk is seen chatting extensively about Twitter and often suggested and received suggestions on how to make Twitter better. So what exactly would Twitter look like based on those chats, and once it’s under Musk’s control?
Blockchain Twitter
We all know about Musk’s love for superapps like WeChat, and if we focus on his own admission regarding this in a podcast, we get a fair understanding of what his plans for the microblogging site may be. “WeChat is a good model — and basically includes functions of Twitter, PayPal and many others,” he said.
In the chats, he talks about a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages or links like Twitter. Furthermore, Musk says that users will have to pay a tiny amount to register their messages on the chain, which will cut out a vast majority of spams and bots. “The idea of blockchain free speech has been around for a long time, the question is how to implement it,” he said.
Musk later said, “Blockchain Twitter isn't possible, as the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer-to-peer network, unless those "peers" are absolutely gigantic, thus defeating the purpose of a decentralised network.”
While it is impossible to predict what the new feature could be based just on this conversation, it is safe to assume that Twitter will have a payment mechanism (maybe based on blockchain) in place, which may also assist in collecting membership fees.
Membership plan
If we go by Musk’s previous conversations, Twitter may not be free-to-use after Elon’s takeover. At least, not wholly. For instance, in May, he tweeted how Twitter won’t be free for some organisations, but free for casual users. “Twitter will always be free for casual users, but may come at a slight cost for commercial/government users.”
In the recently publicly released chats, American internet entrepreneur and podcaster Jason Calacanis was seen advocating for membership fees to be charged from individuals as well as organisations. He proposed charging $50-100 a year from individuals and $10k from corporations for memberships, to which Musk replied, “You are a mind reader”.
Not just that, paid DMs were also mentioned in the discussions. Calacanis proposed that influencers be made to pay $.01 per DM (500,000 followers = $5,000) to be able to DM their followers, a feature they could use to market their forthcoming vlogs, blogs, books, podcasts, and so on. According to him, the method would be spam-proof since followers will unfollow influencers who send too many messages.
Twitter creator program
Another thing that catches attention in the mail is Musk’s focus on creators and how to incentivize them. A contact saved as ‘Viv Hantusch’ pondered over how Twitter can allow high-res videos with an in-app basic video editor. She further wrote, “It would have quite a big impact, I think, especially useful for citizen journalism and fun educational content. Might even help Twitter regain market share lost to TikTok.”
To this, Elon said that because Twitter is not currently monetising videos, it would be a loss for both Twitter and individuals who upload.
The digital titan could also be spotted considering giving creators an incentive to publish first on Twitter. According to Calacanis, Twitter can monitise videos and distribute ad-revenue splits with the best in the business. As per an article by Medium, Elon wants to hire Mr Beast as a dedicated Twitter creator who would follow other content providers as well.
The final word
While these chats are a few months old and many things have changed since then, they do provide an insight into Musk’s mind and plans for Twitter. What we can definitely expect from Musk is end-to-end encrypted messaging in Twitter, as well as a crypto payments gateway. The creator programme may help Twitter gain popularity, although it is unclear whether Twitter will provide lengthy or short video formats.
Furthermore, the addition of creators like Mr Beast to Twitter will ensure that Twitter's user base grows dramatically. Again, everything suggested here was discussed by Musk a few months ago, and the prime prerequisite for all of this would be Musk getting his hands on the microblogging website.
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