Everyone’s talking about Elon Musk’s Twitter shares. The decline of Trump’s Truth Social is the real story

Defying every rule my mama ever taught me, Elon Musk — a man already soaked in the milk of the world’s attention – has bought himself a cow, spending $3.7 billion on 9.2 percent of the stock of Twitter Inc.

Before you could even say, “Man, it must be nice to have $3.7 billion to waste,” Musk made it all back, and more, as Twitter shares rose by 27 percent on Monday. Everybody made money! The tech-heavy Nasdaq average rose more than 250 points. My own portfolio, heavy on the tech stocks, rose almost 2 percent as the lift from Twitter boosted other tech names like Meta Platforms (Facebook to those less cyborgian in their affect than CEO Mark Zuckerberg) and (for some reason) Netflix. Cloud computing companies – which gain precisely nothing when Twitter attracts more or fewer users and advertisers – went especially bonkers.

In fact, about the only person in America who failed to make money on the Twitter news was Donald Trump. His new Truth Social network, conceived as a Twitter killer for conspiracy theorists, lost 25 percent of its value amid a botched rollout and the departure of two executives who experts think were the only people on Trump’s team with the technical chops to fix them.

If only all this money reflected much that matters. And even with Musk joining the Twitter board, as was recently announced, it still probably doesn’t.

Let’s take these things one at a time.

First, nothing happened to Twitter that obviously made it worth 25 percent more than it was worth on Friday, before Musk disclosed his stake. The issue with Twitter – and the reason it was worth about 5 percent as much as Facebook before Monday’s news – is that it’s not a very good advertising medium. Its format’s emphasis on brevity, barely-there use of photography and video, and the flea-like attention span of its users (guilty as charged, and especially when I’m breezing past one 180-character missive to get to the next) combine to make Twitter less than the immersive experience advertisers want to be able to share.

The medium also extracts much less information about its users than Alphabet’s Google search engine, where our user data is literally a list of everything we search for online – something advertisers want much more than your offhand tweet about Georgia Congressnut Marjorie Taylor Greene, which may merely tell the likes of Nike and Expedia that you are able to discern the basics of things that are clear to all.

Most of Wall Street understands this. Jefferies analyst Brent Thill wrote in a report that the stock is overvalued now, and that there’s no new sign that management can or will reach its 2023 growth targets. Wedbush’s Dan Ives speculated that Musk might make a move to buy control of Twitter – with his $288 billion net worth built mostly on his shares in electric-car maker Tesla, he can certainly afford it. But, for what? Even Ives’ report veers quickly to what he sees as the more important question: Will Musk be so distracted by Twitter that he drops the ball somehow at Tesla? He says not.

Musk seems for now to be exercised mostly by his ego here, and by his periodic scrapes with Twitter management when he posts things that aren’t quite true on the platform. He has made brave noises online about Twitter being the governor of America’s town square now, and implied that free speech requires that Twitter let him and others say any nonsense they want to, at any time, even when Musk is implying that people who cross him are pedophiles. The facts of that little contretemps are not worth reviewing here, except to acknowledge that eventually Musk took it back.

Musk’s argument makes, to be clear, a total hash of what free speech law actually is. Freedom of the press, as the media critic A.J. Liebling wrote decades ago, belongs to people who own a press. If Musk wants to control a press, he can buy one. And in Twitter, maybe he will eventually, as Ives says. If so, bully for him,. But it won’t matter much.

America finds itself in a battle over how people who own presses should use them. On the one hand are critics on the left who think social network owners should act like editors and publishers of responsible publications, and screen out nonsense about Jewish space lasers and George Soros that pops into the heads of some users, barring them from Twitter or Facebook if necessary. On the right are those – Musk sometimes aligned with them – who think the meanies at Big Tech are conspiring against God-fearing Americans who love the Confederacy and believe Democrats are molesting children in pizza parlor basements.

In the middle are those who trust the marketplace of ideas to filter out rubbish. It is a fact that the rise of social media and cable television has coincided with the rise to influence, in right-wing circles, of people who used to be laughed offstage by anyone who heard them speak for more than five minutes. Listening to Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime consigliere now accused of fleecing donors who thought they were paying to build a wall over the US-Mexico border, is very much like listening to backers of Lyndon LaRouche back in the day, when LaRouche couldn’t buy his way to anything like the attention Trump gets.

But ask yourself: How many GOP presidents have been elected with a popular plurality since Fox News launched in 1996 and empowered such folks? Zero. The last one was the first George Bush in 1988.

In other words, Americans are not stupid, and social media can take care of itself. As annoying as it often is.

While you’re at it, ask this. If Mexico was supposed to pay for the wall, and you’re an elderly Trumper who sent Bannon money, does that…make you…Mexico? Did you get Spanish lessons for your donation?

Certainly, social media is not a venue where conservatives have trouble getting heard. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser notes, Facebook is already the place online where conservatives share propaganda, with bilge from the likes of talk show host Dan Scavino and Daily Wire columnist Ben Shapiro among the most-shared content nearly every day. The line is simply, well, where Trump is: Spreading outright lies, trying to inspire coup attempts like the January 6 uprising. That, not being conservative – he isn’t – is what got him kicked off Twitter.

As Musk might if he buys Twitter, Trump set out to exercise freedom of the press by owning one. But his Truth Social is cracking up, in the manner of all enterprises with incoherent business plans run by incoherent people. Beset by glitches, its early wave of people who downloaded the Truth Social iPhone app having abated, its top two technology executives left Monday. And the site itself reportedly is just a collection of randos ranting about Ukrainian bioweapons, with hardly anyone else having bothered to look.

When Barack Obama’s Healthcare.gov struggled early on, he had Todd Park, the co-founder of a global technology company, step in to fix it. Park was already on the White House staff. It took six weeks.

Truth Social has a 75-year old loudmouth with the concentration span of a child as the owner responsible for fixing its problems. And former Congressman Devin Nunes – best known for suing an anonymous Twitter user who called themself “Devin Nunes’ Cow” – is chief executive.

That’ll end well.

And it will change the discourse about as much as Elon Musk’s investment in Twitter.