Elon Musk’s Twitterloo

There’s a brilliant (if obvious) analysis of Elon Musk's Twitter Waterloo (Twitterloo?) in The Intercept. Here's the problem for the boy billionaire: Advertisers (who represent the vast bulk of Twitter's revenue) can't handle "The Truth" that Musk keeps proclaiming he's bringing to Twitter. (It turns out that not even Musk wants the unvarnished truth -- just ask comedian Kathy Griffin.) So what's a poor, impulsive billionaire do with a quickly sinking (get it?) ship?

Here's the key graf:

"This is why Musk is now thrashing around in incompetent fury. He enthusiastically impaled himself on the horns on this fundamental dilemma of free speech, one that no one has ever solved. He could have avoided his hilarious nightmare, if he'd just read a few books with a radical perspective on the media. But people who do that tend not to become the richest person on earth."

When I ran the trailblazing online publication Salon from 1995 to 2005, we barely got our media startup to breakeven -- because half of our annual income came from readers. About 100,000 Salon readers were willing to pay $40 a year for our brave, independent journalism. We were the only national publication to devote substantial resources to investigating Grand Inquisitor Kenneth Starr instead of Bill Clinton. Salon lost ad revenue because of our courageous journalism -- but the spike in paying readers kept us afloat.

That's the only way for The Truth to flourish in the Media World. If the public wants it and is willing to pay for it.

Why should people pay for Twitter?