Elon Musk wants Twitter to be profitable, civilized, and open. Can he win the triple crown of social media?

Changing Twitter’s short-sighted corporate culture might seem to be a bigger challenge than establishing a human settlement on Mars - but it's doable.

There's an axiom in the construction industry that goes like this. When it comes to a client getting what they want, they can have it under two out of three circumstances: cheap, fast, or high quality. High quality doesn't come both fast and cheap, and so on.

Elon Musk, now owner of Twitter, faces a similar conundrum when trying to bring three of his objectives for the company into synchrony. 

Musk's pitch deck to investors who considered his ownership bid stated that he could quintuple the company's annual revenue from its current $5 billion to $26.4 billion by 2028. He also tweeted that he wants the service to be a force for good that contributes to non-ideologically homogenous civil discourse. And given his libertarian tendencies, it's a safe bet that he wants these things without the iron fist of government or app store operators to gum up his efforts with onerous regulations.

But the problem Twitter has is that its present earnings model incentivizes use of the platform to post inflammatory bile. The more toxic or boorish a tweet is, the more reactions it tends to get, and the more Twitter's present revenue model thrives. Antithetically, this has also proven to be a growth limiting strategy, proven by its relatively small user base and projected growth rate. It's probably safe to say that being part of a platform that promotes rigid, siloed commentary at best and incitements of violence at worst isn't the best value proposition to attract or retain actual human active users.

So how can Musk lead Twitter to achieve the trifecta of making money and encouraging civil discourse, all without attracting the eye of government regulators?

It begins with Twitter’s biggest value proposition - platform’s user base of international thought leaders and influencers of all walks of life from politics, journalism, industry, media, and civil society who despite its failings, pay attention to what's on the platform. Building on that base should, in theory, allow the platform to become something greater than a sandbox for shitposting. 

For starters, Musk could democratize Twitter's "blue check" verification system. The criteria to become verified right now on the platform is opaque. Allow anyone who wants to become verified to do so, and all of a sudden the user community has a better way of guessing who might be a bot, and the verified user has more credibility within the community for their content. Maybe giving verified users an expanded in-platform experience over non-verified peers would help with this as well. I'm sure one of the world’s leading social media platforms can figure out a way to verify identity without taking on the legal risk of storing personal identity information. 

Musk could also overlay a voluntary verification system with some sort of Uber-like passenger scoring system. How many Uber driver’s cars would be barfed in every day if it wasn't for the dreaded zero star option that ultimately affects the ability to get a ride in the future? A similar system for Twitter could be based on any number of things like how rigid you are in the viewpoints expressed in content, how homogenous a following list is, etc - and who knows, maybe AI monitored but with a full transparent algorithm. I know I'm blueskying with this, but rather than settling for a false choice between a wild-west “hellscape” of hateful content or unworkable government regulations on the same, surely there are better ways to motivate people to gravitate towards civility on their own. 

That said, Musk should bring down the hammer on death threats and clear enticements of violence. Have no mercy on this one, Elon. 

Users also would benefit from greater curation powers over their experience. Twitter’s current algorithmic based model gives limited control over what the platform offers up for anyone to see. For example, a user should be able to entirely curate their main news feed. A secondary, algorithm driven feed wouldn't hurt, but it's primary one should be fully customizable. Continuing to have mechanisms that can be used to manage which accounts interact with a user's content are also a must.

Musk should make it easier to cull following lists. Make it easier to sort who a user is following and to bulk unfollow people. Sometimes a whole house cleaning is needed to change a newsfeed, and that's hard to do one unfollow at a time. 

And importantly, Twitter needs more voices from every corner of the globe on the platform and they need to mix with one another. Twitter has an enormous potential to expand worldviews - and in doing so could also increase its reach and user base.

There are also plenty of opportunities to expand the platform’s utility. For example, Discord, Telegram and WhatsApp are eating Twitter's lunch on "channel-based" engagement. Maybe the next evolution of Twitter’s thread function is some sort of functionality like this. This could allow Twitter users to have the benefit of current 140 character hot takes or diving deeper, but in forums less ripe for radicalization. Additionally, platforms like Substack that allow for easy monetization of written content have opened an area for massive user-platform revenue generation and sharing. Twitter should have been a first mover in that space. It's insane that the company didn't see that opportunity and move sooner. 

These aren't exactly revolutionary ideas, but the fact that Twitter hasn't really attempted any of them does illustrate how managing a social media platform to short term profit might kill it over the medium term. It feels like Twitter’s former management threw up their hands some time ago and opted to squeeze the dregs of profit out of an outdated business model as opposed to demonstrating to shareholders (or their users) a way to generate sustainable value through change.  They also seem to have thought it was better to fight regulators as opposed to getting ahead of problems.

Changing that culture might be Musk's biggest task. 

But this is a guy that love him or hate him, thinks big and has shown he can deliver big over the long term. 

Sesame Street, look out, because with recent events it's possible Twitter could challenge for the title of the biggest bird in the biz.