Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Twitter
I’m about 10 years behind most of the tech industry on reading Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs. I never watched the movies the book spawned. And I didn’t pay much attention to Jobs when he was alive. 2022 felt like a good time to dive into it. There’s something about waiting a bit for the paint to dry on something before thinking too hard about it that allows for a cleaner perspective. I’ve read the book now. And with the buzz around Elon Musk purchasing Twitter this week, I think it’s worth sharing some thoughts about Jobs. I bring up Musk because there’s a useful discussion that includes Jobs of the past and Musk of the current.
Steve jobs died four weeks before I joined my first consumer tech firm. And in reading Isaacson’s account after the fact, it’s pretty clear I entered into the world that Jobs created. The universe of design led thinking is a Jobs’ism. There’s a whole way of working now that’s mostly just what he did when he looked at products. It’s ironic that mostly what Steve Jobs believed was his greatest advantage has come full circle; that corporations were inherently uncreative spaces. They’re good at organizing resources and solving for scale. But there’s no magic within a corporate structure that allows for solving a problem or giving people what they want out of technology. Those things are the domains of people who think different. And the legacy corporate response to Jobs’ creativity is to try to systematise it. I think he’d get a pretty big kick out of that. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s that it’s so predictable.
Corporations don’t think different. But in two discreet periods of time, Steve Jobs was able to position himself in a place where he could use corporate resources to actualize his product gift. The corporation got the better of him the first time and fired him in 1985. The second time he died. But it’s hard to imagine that he would have continued to dominate the board and drive his cult of personality that far after 2010 as the company reached a global scale and market cap that would have stressed Jobs’ directive monopoly. The era of Tim Cook has yielded optimization of existing products and some different colors.
Which brings us to Elon Musk and Twitter. I use Twitter. I engage on it more than any social platform or any other platform besides those I use directly to do my day job. It is the best place to not only learn what’s going on in the world but to gage the broader reaction of humanity to those things. I understand that not everyone is on Twitter. I also understand that those that engage the most on Twitter are self selectively NOT the normal people of the world. But if you have the right frame of mind about what you’re reading; what to take with a grain of salt; who to ignore; who to listen to on what subjects, it’s deeply useful. And it’s moved into a unique place in global utility to treat it differently than simply a consumer software product. Which is why it’s deeply important to address the fact that it is currently, to quote Noah Smith, a “hellsite.”
Twitter is a world that matters where people have to come to participate in social discourse that can ban anyone it wants. Twitter has a quote tweet function that calls in the digital pitchforks and torches. Twitter has a verification system that does a little in the name of verification and a whole lot in the name of class warfare. Twitter is an environment littered with bots and foreign intelligence service propaganda. And if you love all that, Twitter is massively unprofitable. Who wants in…?
It’s actually pretty fascinating that under threat of trying to improve it, some high profile accounts want out. I suspect that’s either political or personal dislike of Musk. But it’s not actually the material issue.
Which is this: It’s pretty obvious that Twitter the platform needs to change. But it’s also obvious that broad board consensus approaches and the sorts of risks allowable under publicly traded companies isn’t going to get it done. So the idea of purchasing it, taking it private and dismissing the board, despite sounding diabolically evil, is the sort of thing that actually makes improving the platform more likely. It’s the sort of thing Jobs did in 1996 when he cleaned out Apple’s board and became the iCEO. But the Apple turn around didn’t happen because he shook up the corporate structure. It was necessary but not sufficient. The turnaround came because of the whirlwind of product innovation that would come over the next five to ten years from Jobs and his design partners. It’s possible no one else on the planet could have done that. It’s certainly true no one else on the planet did do it. Which brings us back to Musk.
The question for Twitter isn’t whether or not Elon Musk buying the company and dismissing the board and eliminating positions is correct. Or what his political beliefs or shitposting tendency makes him inappropriate for such an important role. It’s whether or not Elon Musk can actually come up with the platform innovations required to turn Twitter into something better. I think tuning out everything except that variable, what Elon Musk will/should change about twitter, is actually the way to think about this. Space travel and electric vehicles are mainly engineering problems. The level of code and computer science required to fix twitter is not going to be that dramatic. The decisions on features and policies will be.
So far it’s clear that Musk wants to turn Twitter into a profitable and durable business. Which is not really an evil thing. If he doesn’t we’re all basically stuck with whatever uneven crusader wants to spend 50 billion dollars to lose more money and risk political and financial ruin to run it. The second part is that it’s clear that he wants to get rid of the bots and fraudulent accounts. It’s also clear that whatever the censorship policy was, it’s not going to be the same in the future.
The rest is a bit mysterious. Perhaps it’s time for a serious, nonshitposting Twitter manifesto from the new boss.
One other think to think about. Like many people may have been able to do what Steve Jobs did but only one did, I don’t see anyone else lining up to buy Twitter to transform it into something better. And while clearly some part of that could be assumed motivated by the power controlling the unique global platform will give Elon Musk, that’s only if it works. And if works means a better Twitter and a better global discourse, what’s terrible about that?