Weekly Scroll: Elon's Endgame - by Jeremiah Johnson

Infinite Scroll was in the National Observer and Politico - twice! Welcome to all the new subs from the past week. The Weekly Scroll is our once-a-week update on what’s happening across social media. We follow the nonsense so you don’t have to.

Over the past two years I’ve written a ton about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Much of that has been in a fairly negative light. But post-election, it may be time to reevaluate how we think about Musk’s entire project with the bird app. From Ben Thompson at Stratechery:

What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and in the intervening years the flight of advertisers from the platform has made it worth even less. From a Musk Inc. perspective, however, X played a pivotal role in ensuring that the incoming administration will do whatever Musk needs at the exact moment that SpaceX is gaining the capabilities to actually make a trip to Mars, if only the FAA in particular will give him the freedom to do so. That alone is almost certainly worth $44 billion to Musk!

This, more broadly, gets at why Musk is so hard to discuss: a focus on his accomplishments, particularly Tesla and SpaceX, are so significant that it seems reasonable to excuse the means; at the same time I am sympathetic to those so offended by the means that they oppose him in principle. What cannot be denied, however, is that he is consequential.

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