WEBVTT

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What's next for X or the app
more widely known as Twitter.

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It's difficult to tell,

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but sorting it out with us is
bestselling author Walter Isaacson.

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Will Elon still own Twitter or X
as he's calling it a year from now?

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Oh yeah. Yeah.

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And he will still be hardcore and
he will make it a site that maybe us

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old blue checked anointed types find
disconcerting because it's going to

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be a lot more hardcore as it is, but
it's going to have a lot more video.

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It's going to have ways for people to
produce content and make money off of it.

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It's going to be an everything app,
like a WeChat and others. Yeah.

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Will it become that profitable
super app that he's been talking.

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About? Well,

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it won't be that profitable that soon
because he doesn't quite realize that by

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making it so controversial,
advertisers don't want to be there,

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and that's the main
revenue stream. And he is,

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I think mistakenly blamed it on
the A d L and other things. No,

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the reason brand advertisers don't want
to be on Twitter is they don't like to

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be around controversy.

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So I think it would take
a while before subscriber

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revenue and user revenue
and user payments will

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supplant the advertising that he's lost.

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And maybe some of that
advertising will come back,

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but it is going to take a while.

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There's a moment in the book where
you can ask Elon why Twitter?

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And he admits that it was sort of
off brand for him at the beginning,

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or he thought it was in terms of how
he normally has a grand mission behind

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becoming a space fairing.
Civilization. Species, yeah, exactly.

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Or completely changing our energy sources.

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But then he says he's kind of come around
to the idea that it does have a grand

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mission behind it,

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but he doesn't actually make a very
convincing argument about that. Maybe.

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That's my fault, but I was
certainly not convinced.

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And so you can tell in the book,

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he says it'll help save democracy by
opening the aperture of free speech.

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And even where the gigafactory in Austin
talking about this with some of his

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friends,

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people like Ken Howie
and some others who are

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somewhat conservative friends
of his, and they're saying,

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isn't it a little bit more
complicated than that?

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That having more free
speech doesn't totally mean

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democracy is safer?

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And I'm a believer in free speech,

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but I also believe that if

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have you're amplifying dangerous,

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infringed misinformation or hate speech,

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it can be problematic.

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And I think his view of free speech either

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is more clear than mine or
more simplistic than mine.

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I'm going to go with simplistic
because there is an example. I mean,

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I think he's confuses sometimes what
the meaning of free speech as it's

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protected in the
Constitution actually means.

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There's no law that prevents
companies from saying on my platform.

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You can't, these things. That's not the
issue. He believes that as a company,

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the more speech you allow is better.

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The Constitution doesn't say you to
can curate whatever you want on your

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platform,

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but he felt that if you are
a big social media thing,

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you should open it up to more speech
and a wider variety of speech,

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including fringes.

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You also suggest in the book that
maybe this is actually just his grownup

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version of taking over the
schoolyard where he was bullied.

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Well,

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there are a few people who had that theory
who were very close to him or in the

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book and he was bullied.

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He was beaten up on the playground
and whenever he goes dark,

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it takes him back to those days on
the playground where he was bullied.

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And for him Twitter

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was a playground and now he got to own it.

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That's not the only reason he did it,

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but I do think that that jangles
around in the back of his mind.