Musk’s interest in Twitter is really about the metaverse

Best start believing in the metaverse, you’re in one!

Hot takes on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter range from hopeful optimism, political backlash, cynical accusations of ‘vanity project’ and unwavering convictions that the deal will be called off at the last minute by an unsustainable financial arrangement at its core.

• Whatever the interpretation, it’s clear the $44 billion bid is much bigger than its cashflow potential, because Twitter’s audience of 217 million active users consists of political, financial and media elites.

Is Twitter therefore a meta-media outlet? Given its influence, commentators suggest Twitter is a driver of all media conversation. As Felix Simon, a reporter for Axios’ said on NYT opinion writer Ezra Klein’s podcast this week:

• “You’re absolutely right that Twitter is a meta-media outlet. It is much bigger. It is the platform that undergirds all of those. It is more akin to something like Rupert Murdoch owning Fox News. It is a very powerful tool for anyone to spread narratives that everyone has to pay attention to. And owning that makes you probably the most powerful billionaire in the world.”

The big deal: Musk buying Twitter should be regarded as an acquisition of a metaverse, specifically one that’s capturing a sizeable and influential portion of attention and representing a market for the metaverse sized at $13 Trillion by 2030, according to CitiBank.

A broader definition of the Metaverse based around attention is needed. There’s no reason to confine it to only meaning fully immersive and interconnected virtual reality

• The metaverse right now kind of means everyone has to buy goggles and haptic feedback suits and spend 14 hours a day in an MMO that doesn’t know its limits.
• What makes that truly an absurd vision is the hardware. However, if you look at it from a software or engagement perspective, adults are already spending 11 hours spend each day looking at screens. Shouldn’t that be the metaverse?

Outside of the Musk Twitter acquisition, redefining the metaverse was a key theme this week. Evan Spiegel of Snap Inc., pushed back on the Mark Zuckerberg VR concept of the metaverse, arguing that people simply prefer reality, or at least one his company wants to augment.

• Spiegel’s comments were seriously influential in tech media, with some framing it as a catharsis for the industry lost in the fantasy of a vague buzzword.
• That said, maybe Spiegel’s management decision to ban the word metaverse at the Snap office is the best way to cope with the disillusionment.

The bottom line: Between Spiegel’s comments and Musk’s foray into media, I think this week has been a forceful reminder that we’re already in the metaverse and that there’s a power struggle to own and operate the digital collective consciousness that’s manifesting right in front of our eyes.

Run it back: How I learned to stop worrying and love the meme stock

In other news, the meme stock craze got an interesting look back on the Odd Lots podcast this week. Well over a year has past since GME and AMC went viral and ascended into a new asset class: the meme stock.

• ·The big question is why are GME and AMC still valued so high? Because the ‘meme value’ of a stock trumps whatever socially constructed notions of “fundamentals” modern portfolio theory would have you believe.

As Lily Francus, quant research director at Moody’s Analytics, put it:

• “The only arbiter price of any asset is that someone is willing to buy it from you at that price in the future….Obviously we have models which kind of give us mathematical certainty…but at the end of the day, even those models of fundamental analysis largely depend on either assumptions being correct or the adoption of the model itself.”