Hello everyone. To live is good because the Phillies are in the World Series! (Disclosure: I’m from Philadelphia.) Uh-oh, they just didn’t hit. booooo!
The clear view
In May 1998, I visited Steve Jobs at Apple’s headquarters to hear about his plans to revive Apple. He had been the interim CEO for nearly a year, after returning to the company that fired him more than a decade earlier. He greeted me in the boardroom of his suite at One Infinite Loop, went to the whiteboard, and began working out his solution to the company’s business problems. He had a new product plan, a new product and a workforce that was revitalized by an inspiring ad campaign.
At that time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was well acquainted with the company he suddenly ran, having founded it and led the team that created his flagship product. In his years away from Apple, he’d founded another computer company with a forward-thinking approach to the Internet and next-generation operating systems. Besides, he was Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn the near-bankrupt computer giant around, it would be him. Still, it took him months to come up with his plan and years to execute. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help Apple go black again, it wasn’t until the company’s introduction to non-PC devices — like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007 — that it became a profit machine. And Apple’s post-PC future wasn’t even on Jobs’ road map in 1998.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter last week, he found himself in a somewhat similar situation to Jobs in 1998. Twitter has lost money and has stalled audience-wise as a second-rate social network. But what originally motivated Musk, according to his own tweets and statements, was that he viewed Twitter as the city hall of the world. He would allow more, freer expression on the platform, and… fast. Adding to the urgency was that Musk financed part of his acquisition with bank loans and now had to pay off the debt. Musk immediately began taking steps to change the fate of Twitter, literally and culturally.
If hubris had a hall of fame, Musk would be a first voter. He believes his Musk attitude will enable him to do what generations of previous Twitter leaders couldn’t even accomplish, wiping out historical precedent as a pesky mosquito. Twitter started in 2006, but didn’t take off until almost a year later, when it became a hit at the South by Southwest conference. From that moment on it experienced enormous growth. In a 2009 memo, then-CEO Evan Williams quoted at a strategy meeting, “If we had a billion users, that would be the pulse of the planet.” At the time, a billion Twitter users seemed plausible, if not inevitable. And Williams believed that with this foundation, it would be easy to come up with a business plan that would make the company hugely profitable. But Twitter never got half of those billion users, and while it seemed to have a good ad-based business model, in its nearly 20 years on Earth, it’s only made a profit for two years. Everyone who has run Twitter has tried to drive user growth and increase profits. Evan Williams tried. Dick Costolo tried. Jack Dorsey tried twice. Time and again, smart people who knew the workings of the platform inside out, tried and failed to take Twitter from a major voice platform to a mammoth tech power. Musk, a Twitter superuser just now learning how Twitter works as a business, plans to do it — or at least figure out how — before putting up his Christmas tree.
Musk needs to look no further than his own successful ventures to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company had been around for five years. Musk came up with a brilliant plan to turn the company around, but it didn’t make an annual profit until 2020, 17 years after it was founded. Musk rightly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has accomplished — and for, among other things, his perseverance. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and does not report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience – it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can lead to killing people.
