Twitter is pivoting to video, as all dumb websites eventually must

a move only a true busines genius could execute

Yeah, you know what would've been a better solution? Do the exact opposite of every decision Musk has made.

I think Twitter could've been profitable with a few small tweaks to get more from big content generators. When running a SM site, your #1 priority should be to make the experience for regular users better and make money from content producers. Maybe have a few money-making options for regular customers like paying to remove ads, but the bulk of the revenue stream should come from ideas like:

• permalink messages - this would also make them easier to find with a search
• real account verification - not the stupid blue checkmark thing, but an actual human verifies your identity
• promoted messages - not ads (i.e. ban attempts to market products), just increase visibility, but would be time-limited (i.e. pay for a boost over the next hour, day, week)
• integrations with other platforms - have a blog? pay to auto-link when you make a new post!

This only works because Twitter is already big, so if you're starting from scratch, you just don't charge for anything and maybe run some ads to offset losses. But once your platform gets big, that's when you start milking the whales.

But no, Musk instead tried to milk the userbase, so the userbase just leaves. He also decided to reinstate undesirable accounts, which offends advertisers. And he decided to make account authentication worthless, so content creators have no reason to stay. He's making every possible wrong decision.

It'd just be boring video responses to video responses

Have you seen tiktok?

He is definitively a risk taker. The thing with a risk is that is easy to take if you have money, and if you have a lot of money you can fail many times.

He was born to rich family and had that luxury.

Here's summery of his evandors:

1995 - Founded Zip2 with his brother, got ousted from CEO position in 1996, the company was sold to Compaq in 1999
1999 - he launched his X.com with three founders
2000 - X.com merged with Confinity resulting in PayPal, Musk again was ousted as a CEO on the same year, in 2002 they sold it to eBay (he no longer was in the company but still had stocks)
2002 - He used his money from PayPal to fund SpaceX
2004 - Tesla. This one is interesting, because he is recognized by a lot of people as founder, but he was investor, but they let him to paint himself as Founder
2006 - SolarCity - it didn't do well and was purchased by Tesla in 2016
2015 - co-funded OpenAI, he resigned in 2018 due to conflicts with Tesla AI
2016 - co-funded Neuralink
2016 - The Boring Company - supposed to be working on creating hyperloop, but that idea turned out to be failure, and now any mention of hyperloop was scraped from the company website. He apparently admitted that hyperloop was successful attack to stop California from building high speed rail.
2022 - Twitter

So it looks like largely his biggest successes were Zip2, X.com/PayPal and SpaceX and investment in Tesla. In Zip2 and X.com he was ousted before companies got successful.

SpaceX and Tesla are where he actually succeeded the rest after that he was just throwing money in investments. Technically that's also what happened with Tesla.

I think his smarts are focused on particular kinds of companies and particular kinds of projects, and a large pre-established social media company is very far outside of those usual areas where he's successful.

It's hard to do well with social media when you're a colossal asshole with poor social skills.

Videos are easier to add advertising to

Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?

Half of US adults cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level.
Video is easier and faster for most people, as much as I dislike it. It's a way for a clueless board of MBAs to circumvent the "literacy" problem of more widespread adoption of their service. Lowest-common-denominator corner-shaving ruins everything, as usual.