Musk's stake in Twitter, does it matter? | Plum Zi Yue

On Monday, news that Musk spent $3 billion to buy a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter and become the company's largest shareholder came to light online. Just a day later, Twitter announced that Musk would join the company's board.

We can explore the "strategic purpose" of Musk's investment behavior along the lines of previous business analysis. In general, when we discuss the behavior of an institution or public figure, we always like to mythologize the object of observation and impose "strategic meaning" on it.

For example, looking back at the decision of our country to allow Tesla to build a factory in Shanghai a few years ago and give a lot of policy and financial support, we were all saying that this was to introduce a catfish and give local manufacturers some competitive vitality. Is it really that complicated? It is not as simple as thinking, the policymakers at that time basically decided that Tesla will be the top two automakers in the future, and the taxes and jobs it can bring will be a huge wealth.

Also in this simplest and most basic way to see Musk's stake in Twitter, the conclusion is much clearer: this narcissist, highly likely narcissistic personality disorder, he joined Twitter in order to make a splash, become the focus of public opinion, and have a supreme position on the social media he uses, it's as simple as that. Go to the center of public opinion, become the focus of public opinion, this has always been Musk's supreme code of conduct, the Thai cave children's team rescue incident is the most typical example, when this matter caused great concern, Musk immediately expressed his willingness to provide assistance; when his rescue plan was accused of fooling around by the search and rescue captain, he immediately used the most vicious words to personally attack the doubters. He is such a person who can't stand being snubbed and questioned.

▲ Screenshot from "Saturday Night Live" subtitle provider see watermark

But that doesn't matter, but what about knowing why Musk took a stake in Twitter, even if it proves that he is building his own business empire, and his ambitions have gone beyond money to power. What is really worth caring about is the possible impact of this matter.

Silicon Valley business culture has long influenced the way mainstream culture thinks. The public accepted "out of control", accepted "disruptive innovation", accepted "dropouts are more promising"... There are even times when the public does not just accept, but identifies something that is not worthy of recognition, such as the founder of a technology company should be deviant, so that deviance has become a standard rule, if a tech company boss wears a suit and a three-piece suit to speak at the press conference, people will look down on him.

By now, tech company culture has begun to blatantly produce lies and fallacies, such as Fake it until you make it.

The phrase itself has a long history, much older than Silicon Valley tech companies, but the latter makes it a creed of success. Its metamorphosis was largely accomplished through the VR company Magic Leap scam to the blood testing company Theranos scam.

The story of Theranos is even more sensational, its founder Elizabeth Holmes has long been known as the female version of Jobs, from the company's investors to the board of directors brought together a number of important American politicians and businessmen. The company claimed to have completed more than 200 specialized medical tests by collecting a drop of blood from the fingertips, and after the scam was finally uncovered, Holmes gave the explanation that the technology was the company's vision, and the company was gradually realizing it, but it had not yet been able to do it. Paradoxically, many people understand Holmes's explanation, because many startups do it: come up with ideas, implement them step by step, and fake it until you make it.

The problem is, Holmes' Theranos are a complete hoax. In the beginning, the team's product development direction was still around a drop of blood at the fingertip, but after several failures, the second version of the technical solution already required a larger amount of blood testing, and by the time the scam was exposed, the detection machine was already a reassembly version of the Siemens equipment. In other words, Theranos is not gradually realizing the vision of more than 200 professional tests in one drop of blood, but is getting farther and farther away from that vision.

All the tech companies that support the idea of "fake it until you make it, as well as the demagogic media, like to cite Apple and Tesla, which are also growing into big companies step by step. But those people are completely mistaken in the point, Apple and Tesla have never taken a specific product as a vision, and Apple and Tesla have never deceived the product itself, they will not promise to say "our new product can do xxxx" and then come up with counterfeit goods in an attempt to fool through, they will delay, they will encounter capacity problems, the product itself will be flawed, but they will not deceive the public that the product has its own capabilities.

Fake it until you make it is a sophistry that distorts reality, and the scam companies try to fool around with "we tried, but we just didn't do it", they deliberately confuse the essence of "vision" and "product": Magic Leap and Theranos say that their product can do xxxx, only to be proven to be unable to do it at all, and after being debunked, they say that it is a vision. The real fact is that all those successful companies don't fake, Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Tesla... The products they launched were what they promised in the first place.

▲ Screenshot from Magic Leap's famous fake video

Such a straightforward and clear sophistry can trigger the discussion of mainstream public opinion, and it has become a kind of ambiguity of business ethics, and the status quo is already very absurd. This is enough to prove that the ability of technology companies to guide public opinion and confuse public opinion has become extremely powerful, so powerful that it can almost refer to deer as horses.

So for this phenomenon, will the impact of Musk's stake in Twitter be suppressed or intensified? First of all, we all know that Tesla has the most disgraceful history among successful technology companies, including rough workmanship, private chip swaps, brake door puzzles, etc., and the boss of such a bad technology company has become the largest shareholder of global social media, which is at least not a thing worth rejoicing.

But this is still not the key, what is really important is that we realize that the public opinion influence of the original technology companies can be stacked. Musk is the owner of the world's most valuable auto company, the world's richest man, and today, the largest shareholder in one of the world's largest social media companies.

This incident also gives us a glimpse of a fact that has not been noticed in the past, and that the mainstream information platforms of the future are also technology companies. In the past, the media industry had companies in the media industry, companies in the automotive industry, companies in the retail industry, companies in the medical industry, companies in the home appliance industry... But in the foreseeable future, the leaders of all these industries may become technology companies, and when technology companies expand their tentacles to media, automotive, retail, medical and other industries, the culture of technology companies will inevitably penetrate into the social level corresponding to these industries.

Anyone has to face such a problem, and are tech companies ready to deal with such a huge responsibility? Does their culture have the capacity to cope with such a huge responsibility?

The cover image is from GETTY IMAGES

Wen | plums from Tiexi District

Figure | network

Cutting-edge information Original perspective

The most compelling original automotive new media brand

Sina Weibo: @Driver Pie

Driving Pie has now entered the major media platforms

The average daily view of the whole network exceeds 1,000,000 times