Tuesday 26 April 2022 11:06 am

So what’s the plan, Elon?

PLENTY of people have laughed at Elon Musk over the years, and often it’s the eccentric billionaire that’s had the last laugh. At various points, everything from Tesla to SpaceX has been written off – but even with a track record of proving critics (mostly) wrong, his anticipated acquisition of Twitter looks an almighty risk.

The platform has achieved a notoriety and importance beyond its reach. As a City media analyst put it last week, Twitter’s audience is small and niche – and still difficult to monetise. So what’s Elon up to?

The easy answer is that a man with time on his hands and money to burn fancies making a point. This is a man who named one of his children X AE A-XII, so he’s not beyond a statement or two.

But he’s also not a fool with his money, and Tesla’s recent growth – with revenues growing far faster than Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple in the last decade – suggests he knows what he’s doing with a business model. The latest of his cockamime ideas, Hyperloop, enters full testing this year. He may even get that one right, too.

So what might he do with Twitter? Like all the platforms, he’s faced with regulation on one side and upstart competition on the other. Twitter has failed to work out how to monetise its audience, and its new features, when they come along, are invariably rolled out in a suitably clunky way.

It’s also become the poster child for the culture wars, even though most of it is fought on Facebook groups. It’s hard to see how new ownership or an edit button is going to fix any of these problems. It is doubly hard to see a political world moving towards more oversight of social media platforms being relaxed about the takeover of one of the better known ones by a fire-and-brimstone libertarian.

We may look back at Musk’s purchase of Twitter as yet another example of the billionaire proving everybody wrong. At the minute, however, it looks a very expensive vanity project.