…well it kind of is.
The entire tech-bro industry is built on a house-of-cards. Much of it isn’t profitable. Much of it don’t even have a pathway to profitability. The typical game plan is to raise venture capital, build a product or services that is popular and sell it for less than it costs to hopefully get market share, then cash out when the price is right just-before-it-fails. Because when you are running a business that doesn’t and will never make a profit, failure is an inevitability.
The Twitter board cashed out. And Elon’s the sucker left carrying the can.
I’ve talked about the Banquet Bear Theory of Chaos before. Things are predictably unpredictable. We know Twitter is going to fail. Billions of debt. No business plan, no strategy, no pathway to profitability, no accountability, no guardrails on the man in charge who is currently cozying up to some of the most appalling people on Twitter and is publicly picking fights with the only people who could possibly save him.
Twitter is almost certainly going to fail. That much is predictable. Exactly how that failure will look though? We don’t really know, because there are so many moving parts, the situation is extremely chaotic, things are changing hour-to-hour. But we can predict though is that it will be spectacular, and very-very-public.
I do see one way out for Musk here though. The only way that Twitter survives is if the tech-bro industry closes ranks and bails him out. And I can see that happening. Again: I don’t know exactly what a “bail out” would look like. I’m imagining someone like Marc Benioff or Larry Ellison helping out behind the scenes. Bringing in a Twitter CEO who’s job is to put the guardrails up and to basically calm-everything-the-fuck-down.
But that’s the only way that Twitter survives. Tech isn’t going to save it. The Tech-Bro industry going “we aren’t going to let Elon Musk lose face” is the only way that Twitter gets out of this.