LISBON, Portugal — It only took about ten minutes to get to Elon.
I’m at a press conference with Microsoft President Brad Smith and Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, at Web Summit in Lisbon on Thursday.
Smith announced a donation of $100 million of cloud services to help Ukraine fight the Russians. Second question in the Q&A: “Is Elon Musk still supporting Ukraine through Starlink [his satellite internet service]?
Fedorov smiles and says something in Ukrainian. Translation: “Yes, Elon is.”
Musk seems to be part of every conversation these days. Here at the world's largest tech conference — 71,033 attendees from 160 countries — Musk is an overwhelming presence, even though he’s not physically present. If it’s not SpaceX and Starlink, it’s Tesla and of course Twitter. What is Musk doing? What is he thinking? What’s up with the layoffs?
This is the case even in Europe, where distrust and antipathy towards big American tech companies runs high. Web Summit is made up of many more Europeans than say CES or South by Southwest: Americans are only the fifth biggest contingent here, according to Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave. That makes it a great place to get a different perspective on Musk — though Elon’s taking all the air out of the room here, too.
This video grab taken from a video posted on the Twitter account of billionaire Tesla chief Elon Musk on October 26, 2022 shows himself carrying a sink as he enters the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. (Photo by various sources / AFP) ·- via Getty Images
Elon is seemingly bound and determined to dominate the news cycle. Every. Single. Day. You can call him a relentless self-promoter, insanely narcissistic, or just off his rocker. But he’s also trying to foist massive change on massive industries; cars, space travel, social media, really humanity, in real time. You may hate him, you may love him, but as the line goes, one thing you can’t do is ignore him.
Musk is the richest man in the world and one of the most famous people in the world who’s constantly seeking attention on one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, which he now owns. That’s a pretty powerful combination.
So getting back to Twitter, the hottest sector of Musk’s heat map right now, what exactly do we know — besides his sometimes amusing, sometimes trolly posts and squabbles with AOC?
First, as Microsoft’s Brad Smith told me: “Elon Musk is undeniably one of the greatest technology visionaries of our generation.” Second: Running a social media company — and turning it into a super app — may or may not be outside Elon’s area of expertise. Third: Twitter now has $13 billion of debt on its books, making it highly leveraged, which will certainly affect Musk’s decisionmaking. Fourth: Even though Twitter has 238 million DAUs, Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley points out it is getting long in the tooth as upstarts like TikTok, BeReal and Discord take market share and attract younger audiences. Fifth: We don’t know the degree to which Musk has an actual plan. Sixth: No doubt Twitter detracts from Musk running SpaceX and Tesla etc. Seventh: Many have doubted him before, and he has delivered. Sometimes. Which really has no bearing on Twitter.
Ambiguous enough for you? Sorry not to be more definitive, but that’s all the gospel.
“I am a technical person — I do coding — so I have a lot of respect for Elon as a technical person," Mikki Kobvel, a Ukrainian software consultant based in Lisbon and Singapore, told me. "But I get worried when I see someone doing something just for their reputation for their image."
An antenna of the Starlink satellite-based broadband system donated by the US tech billionaire Elon Musk in Izyum, Kharkiv region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on September 25, 2022. (Photo by Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP) ·YASUYOSHI CHIBA via Getty Images
Andrey Khusid, founder and CEO of Miro, a unicorn tech company based in the Netherlands with offices in San Francisco, said that "Elon is obviously a genius with all his companies. I think it is 50/50 whether Elon will succeed with Twitter, but I do think he has a plan. Right now these are just steps. I think he has a big picture idea and I think we need to judge him on the outcome not just the steps along the way. Maybe it will be the most important social media platform in the world.”
Americans here are sharing their take on Musk too, most notably ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood.
“We did invest [in Twitter], as [Elon] took it private. We're very excited about that,” Wood told interviewer Ann Curry on the main stage. “Elon believes in vertical integration. I think he could turn this into a super app like WeChat pay. Remember, he started in the payments industry with PayPal.”
Wood has actually created a way for retail investors to buy into Twitter through the Ark Venture Fund, which reportedly has 12% of its assets in Twitter. Investors can buy into with as little as $500.
Curry also asked Wood about Twitter’s toxicity.
“The darkness was in their opacity,” Wood said. “We didn't see the algorithms and how they were working.”
Wood added that she believes Twitter could rely on open-source code and software which could be viewed and modified by the public.
Cathie Wood, the CEO and Chief Investment Officer at ARK Invest, speaks during a session at the Web Summit in Lisbon on November 2, 2022. (Photo by Henrique Casinhas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) ·SOPA Images via Getty Images
This is a perspective shared by Chris Anderson, head of TED (as in TED Talks), who spoke with me at a dinner about how he believes Musk will move toward some sort of crowdsourced and or outsourced model to determine what content is accentuated.
In the interview, Musk said that “one of the things that I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and make any changes to people's tweets, if they're emphasized or de-emphasized, that action should be made apparent so anyone can see that action's been taken so there's no behind the scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually." (The full hour plus interview is here. Transcript here.)
At another dinner I caught up with Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (known as CZ), very much a star here, who now lives part-time in Paris ("It's quite crypto friendly," he told me.) CZ just made news for... you guessed it... investing $500 million in Elon's Twitter buyout. Why?
"It's all about freedom of speech," he said.
Beyond the super app and open sourcing, there are all manner of rabbit holes and conspiracy theories out there on what Musk intends to do with Twitter. Or, as one Web Summit participant from Britain said to me regarding Elon’s Twitter: “The content moderation will become the product.”
I think I know what that means, but I’m not sure.
Besides his laudatory point about Musk, Microsoft’s Smith sought to make a distinction between Twitter and his company’s social media platform.
“At LinkedIn [which Microsoft owns], we really strive to use it as a platform that creates more light than heat," he said. "In the world today, there's a lot of heat, and I think we should all strive to ensure there's a little more light, and let's see if we can advance civil discourse along the way.”
And that would be the eighth thing we know about Elon and Twitter: Advancing civil discourse is probably not so high on his agenda.
