Elon Musk has upended Twitter’s business. Here’s how he could fix it
The founder of Tesla, Elon Musk, has turned his company into a tech culture phenomenon, building his own empire, and he’s the driving force behind the electric car revolution sweeping the world.
It was his visionary, “go big or go home” approach that earned Musk the nickname in 2011 as the “Elon Musk of Silicon Valley.” His company makes electric cars, space rockets, an electric car, a computer, a high-altitude rocket, a bullet train, an airplane and now even a space elevator, a giant, inflatible space-based structure that would let astronauts safely visit Mars.
So what happened? While Musk himself doesn’t know, he’s learned that an internet company isn’t a business.
“He can’t stop tweeting,” says Gartner research analyst Andrew LaCasse. “This is the Twitter of the future. Twitter is what he’s built. And so he has to adapt, he has to turn it around, he has to change it so that he has more control.”
Musk was so good at the Twitter model that he turned it into the company that dominates the social networking space, now worth more than $70 billion, according to Business Insider.
The problem? He didn’t take out his wallet for the payments necessary to pay for the free services, meaning that the site needs a huge funding boost.
“To do what he’s doing, he has to be prepared to pay for Twitter. He’d also have to pay for Tesla, which is what he’s doing now,” LaCasse says. “What he’s created to date, he started with free, free services, and then it has to pay for it somehow.”
But if you think about it, he’s not making any money from Tesla and from Uber. To make a Tesla, you have to buy the car, which Musk is building for all the world to use. And to make Uber, you have to pay the taxi drivers and the drivers themselves, which Musk is building through the company
