Elon Musk should not make the Twitter Phone — for his own sake
The new week is barely a day old and Twitter owner Elon Musk is attempting to whisk up his acolytes into another rebellion, this one against Apple.He claimsthe company is tightening the screws on his platform, presumably urging him to increase content moderation or else risk its removal from the iOS ecosystem. Google has also been in his sights for pretty much the same reason. Furthering his leverage is the fact that both have been embroiled invarious controversies regarding their takes of app publishers' revenues— and withbillions in debtto pay back to creditors, the self-ascribed free speech warrior will need every penny he can get fromselling verification badgesto users and placing eyeballs on the ad slots he’s currently struggling to sell. But what if the App Store and Play Store were to shunt Twitter from their walled gardens? One way he could respond besides lawsuits is to go direct-to-consumer for mobile hardware. After all, original hardware presents many opportunities for padded margins. Well, last week,Musk indicated a willingness to do just that.
I know, I’ve managed to pull a long-enough thread on a throwaway comment that shouldn’t have warranted so much attention. But in the short time that I’ve put any active thought into it, I haven’t been able to wrap my head about how such a product could make money on its own.
So, what would a Twitter Phone look like? Practically, and somewhat paradoxically, it might run Android. We already know open-source Android can be forked to serve any purpose, so Google wouldn’t have to see any money come its way whether it’s for licensing Google apps for pre-loads or the Play Store as its app store —Amazon’s Fire tabletsrun Android without any of Google services and there are a handful of commercial-use products such as point-of-sale systems with foundations in Google-free Android. The developer field for Android is also quite abundant and would be quick to hire for such an expedient need. Suffice to say, there would have to be some incredible rationale to stray from this predictable choice.
In spite of his performance thus far on Twitter, Musk has been able to exercise some level of managerial competence at his other properties like Tesla and SpaceX so long as we gloss over some of the finer details which include accusations of unsafe labor practices during the COVID pandemic and from former employees regarding the prevalence of workplace sexual harassment (seeThe Washington PostandRolling Stone). Let’s say he’s able to gather a workforce to design, engineer, and maintain a user-friendly mobile Twitter terminal. After all, is it in Musk’s interests to let other microblogging sites like the conservative-aligning Gab or Truth Social onto a device of his own making, even if he is trying to further what he believes to be free speech? Perhaps, if he charged rent. That said, Truth Social’s owner — former President Donald Trump — might not be inclined to make eventhatkind of a deal; he hasn’t posted on his one-time favorite social platform since Musk reinstated his account earlier this month (viaReuters).
Unless Musk can shoehorn a killer side app related to Tesla, SpaceX, and/or any of his other entities, it’d only make sense to center the phone around planning and communicating with Twitter. Do device owners get Twitter Blue for free? Some sort of insurance perk for their Model X? Free tickets to rocket launch viewings? Maybe — as Liz Wheeler says, “the man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy” — but for any such amenity he might consider including, it’s his money chasing after his users' money. He just needs to catch all of his 200 million or so daily active users and then end up making $200 per unit sold. Boom! $40 billion in the bank. If Apple does it, why can’t he?
We already talked about how the Freedom Phone (viaScreenRant) seems to have fallen short of its mainstream ambitions, especially as some in its niche ultra-right audience have criticized the hardware’s Chinese origins. It’s also failed on execution, too, with shipment delays plaguing customers who’ve paid hundreds of dollars for a low-end device. To top it all off, the Freedom Phone’s creator celebrated the arrival of volume inventory back in January with a tweet he sent from an iPhone (viaDaily Dot). It’s an unfortunate marketing faux pas that Musk has ensured will never happen again as he has ordered his engineers toscrub originating device metadata from tweets. At least if the Twitter Phone does ever come to pass, Musk can hide the fact that he’s sneaking all of his tweets through an iPhone. All of this is shorthand to say that a lot can go wrong and that ithasgone wrong for others who’ve tried. The value proposition for consumers cannot include big mistakes on Musk’s part.
Alright, we’ve slid down this slippery limb far enough and I’m not drawing up any GUI blueprints because writing this up is tiring enough. Elon Musk has admitted to spending nearly all of his waking hours since his acquisition of Twitter trying to figure out where to steer this bird of a “public square.” Meanwhile, the Tesla CEO has seen the automaker’s market cap tumbling from its year-to-date peak of nearly $1.2 trillion in April to under $970 billion in mid-September before hitting a bottom of $530 billion last week. It’s recovered slightly since then, but Musk is not in a position to be engaging Apple and Google in free speech wars unless he has the right friends in high places and workers who either believe in him or are forced to believe in him to mount an effective counteroffensive, much less build a Twitter Phone.
But hey, what do I know about money?
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