BIRD BRAIN
Yet the number of mentions of the name of one of the biggest threats to geopolitical peace in the world (Iran) over the same period? 798. And mentions of the finance world’s hottest investment theme (ESG, or environmental, social, and corporate governance)? 881. Tweets win, hands down. Twitter is an extraordinary, transformational product – in a market where the rewards for just minor tweaks of tech innovation come with nine zeros. And despite all this... Twitter is a disappointment of Hindenburg-ian dimensions . AN EPICALLY BAD INVESTMENT It’s silly to assess an individual’s worth to society based on his net worth. For people, money is just one dimension of the how-am- I-doing scoreboard of life. But it’s not at all nonsensical to gauge the success of a company based on how much wealth it delivers to shareholders. After share price returns, anything else (bringing value to customers, beating the competition, providing opportunities to employees, keeping the staff lounge stocked with peanuts, etc.) is secondary – and a pathway – to one share price appreciation, which benefits small shareholders like you and me. (Profits are nice... but not a necessary or sufficient condition to make money for shareholders.) And on this, Twitter has been a big failure... Investing at or around the IPO (initial public offering – that is, when a company first sells
TWITTER’S TREMENDOUSNESS Twitter is the heartbeat of the worlds of entertainment, media, and news, available to anyone with a phone... all over the world, with 206 million users globally (18% of whom are in the U.S.). It’s a technological, cultural, political, and communication juggernaut, with reach and influence that’s rivaled only by a handful of other companies (like Facebook and Google). Twitter is one of history’s few brands that is sufficiently ubiquitous and dominant to become a word (and a verb, no less) – in the company of google, xerox, and taser. Twitter is an extraordinary, transformational product – in a market where the rewards for just minor tweaks of tech innovation come with nine zeros. It allows users direct and unfiltered access to the firsthand insights and thoughts of celebrities, politicians, the boldface folks who – just a decade ago – were available only through the filter of the media. For four years, Twitter was the primary platform that an American president used to communicate to his followers, the media, the country, and the world... a high-tech policy platform and soapbox and megaphone, all wrapped into one. Just how big is Twitter? The number of times the Financial Times used the word “tweet” in the past year: 1,088. (And the likelihood that a material number of these were referring to the sound that a bird makes? Approaching zero.)
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August 2021
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