Elon Musk's Strategy for Twitter is to Supercharge Performance - And Then 10x the Product (145)

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Welcome welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson and this is the tech strategy podcast where we dissect the strategies of the best digital businesses of the US China and Asia and the topic for today Elon Musk's strategy for Twitter Which is supercharged performance and 10x the product. That's my shorthand version for what I think he's doing but I'll actually lay it out in quite a few steps and Honestly, I think I'm right on this one. I think I'm ahead of the curve. I think it's, I've been reading absolutely everything and the cool part about this is, he's actually kind of doing this in public. Like everything he's doing, he sort of tweets it out. It's like, you know, it's not behind closed doors. He's kind of telling everyone what he's doing day by day. It's really interesting. So anyways, it looks to me like a lot of digital strategy and it looks like a turnaround case. I kind of have done both of those things. So anyways, you can tell me if you think I'm right or not, but I think I might be. Okay, so that's what we'll go through today. And let's see what else, Asia Tech Tour, we're putting up the details of that today. I will put that in the show notes if you wanna get the actual breakdown of this is the one week trip to Asia, Singapore, Jakarta, probably Thailand, although we haven't said it exactly in March. We'll put up the details. I'll put the link in the show notes for where that is, but that's all going up to date. What else? Motes and Marathons six book series is done. It's been done for a week. It's all up on Amazon. As I kind of joked last week, I think part six is actually the best one, which is really bad because it's number six. Like, and you got to kind of go through all of them. I really should have pulled some of that up to the front. It just sort of worked out that way because I wrote them and published in sequence. So there it is. Okay, and I think that's it. Those of you who are subscribers, I sent you a lot of detail on Elon Musk in the last three days, and what he's doing with Twitter. I mean, it was a lot, but I actually think it was pretty readable. It wasn't me just going down like loads of text. I mean, I put in a lot of graphics. I think it's actually pretty readable. So hopefully that's a little better than before. This week we're talking about, because I'm kind of done with the Twitter bit, we'll talk about Zed Delivery, iFood, Magalu. So finish up some of the Brazilian companies which we talked about before, but I didn't totally complete those. So that'll be the topic for today. Those of you who aren't subscribers, feel free to go over to jeffthousen.com, sign up there, see what you think, free 30 day trial. And with, oh, I forgot my disclaimer. Yep, disclaimer, nothing in this podcast or in my writing a website is investment advice. The numbers and information from me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky. This is not investment, legal or tax advice. Do your own research. And with that, let's get into the topic. Now, as always, there's a couple sort of digital concepts. Today, it's not gonna be anything terribly new, maybe one bit that's new. But this'll just be the digital operating basics, which I've talked about forever. A little bit about digital marathons, which I've also talked about, for the Smile Marathon and then payment platforms. Maybe the one bit which is new, which I haven't really talked about, is within audience builders. Audience builder is a platform type. where you have two user groups, you are in the interactions business and you are facilitating and enabling interactions in this case between people who create content, content creators and people who consume content. So that's YouTube, that's TikTok, two user groups, very nice network effects, tends to have a lot of long tail content, which makes the network effect particularly powerful. But there's sort of a subtlety in this and I'll put a slide in the show notes. which is on the webpage. Unfortunately, I can't put them under iTunes, which is this idea of, if the interaction is between a content creator, let's say someone who's making a short video on TikTok and someone who's watching videos, like everybody, those can sometimes be the same people, but I put them as different user groups because they're doing different roles. So it doesn't necessarily mean they're different. Someone who watches videos can turn the phone around and become the content creator as opposed to the content consumer. Okay. And that's very easy to see in something like YouTube because most people don't make YouTube videos. When you get to TikTok, it blurs a bit more because it's pretty easy to go back and forth. Well, when you move on to something like Twitter, it's really seamless, like... Okay, I'm reading tweets and now a tweet went out. Did I just become a content creator? So as you move more into sort of these discussion platforms, the whole idea of a two-sided platform, I think it kind of breaks down a little bit. This distinction, this model I'm using, it's a very good model for something like YouTube. It's a very good model for people leaving reviews on TripAdvisor or Expedia. At a certain point when it's just sort of a long running back and forth conversation in a Reddit or a Twitter, this model doesn't work that well. It's sort of like, yeah, isn't it everyone just talking? Is this really a two sided platform with two user groups and we're getting network effects because we've standardized the interaction? It's like not really. So when you look at something like Twitter and when you look at something like Facebook, The distinction between content creator and consumer is so vague that I generally don't talk about them that way. You know, all of these frameworks, I've given you, I know, 50 different concepts on the concept library. They all work in certain places and they start to not work in others. And you got to kind of know when this framework isn't helping you anymore. So Twitter, Facebook, social media, I don't usually talk about them as two-sided platforms audience builders. I think there's something a little bit different and I don't quite have a great name for it. So that's sort of one distinction to think about. The other distinction to think about is if I'm on a marketplace platform, Lazada, Taobao, Shopee, I can be a consumer or I can be a merchant, two user groups. I go on as the consumer, I buy my goods. That's pretty much the end of the interaction. I'm not gonna share. my goods, oh look what I just bought on Lazada, even though if you're on Lazada, they always try and get you to share what you just bought. You know, you just booked a trip, share it with your friends. They're always getting you to sort of share on social media for marketing purposes. That's kind of one where that doesn't happen on marketplaces, but it happens all the time on something like Twitter, something like YouTube. because people tend to share content like crazy. You know, they share videos, they share Instagram photos. So the way I sort of describe this, I'm gonna put the graphic in the show notes. I describe it as an audience builder platform, but the primary user group is not consumers, it's connected consumers, which means maybe a consumer on TikTok watching videos is a connected consumer and they will share the video with their friends. That's kind of how I make that look and that's kind of how I consider Facebook and Twitter and these is they're sort of just networks of connected consumers and then platforms feed into that. Anyways, I'll show you the graphic. So it's a little bit of a distinction, but it also I think makes it much easier to understand. And we don't see any of that on the other platforms very much. People don't share what they bought on a payment platform. They don't share what they bought on Lazada. But it really does happen on audience builders. There's a lot of sharing between the consumers. So anyways, take a look at the graphic. I think that's a pretty important distinction, but I've never really had a great way to describe something like WhatsApp or Facebook in any of my five platform types. It doesn't really fit that well in those. Anyways, the way I think about it is, Andreessen Horowitz uses this. which is anytime you can take a product or service and add a social layer to it, they call it social plus, it makes it more robust. That's kinda how I view that. It's like we have a basic audience builder and we've added a social plus layer, but it's not really a platform in its own right. Anyways, that's a bit of theory. Take a look at it, see what you think. If you have any suggestions, let me know. All right, with that, let me get to the content. So those are sort of the concepts for today. Digital operating basics, smile. Marathons and then we'll call it audience builder with connected users audience builder with connected viewers something like that Okay now Elon Musk is absolutely rocking and rolling at Twitter like the speed at which he's moving is stunning I mean Twitter has been a screw-up for ten years like It's the way I've always thought about Twitter is like if you look at the share price of Twitter before all this happened this year. And 10 years ago, it's about the same. Like, what social, you have one of the few social media companies in this world, and you had the largest tech bull run we've ever seen, and you didn't move your share price in a decade? Look at Facebook 10 years ago. So it has just been a basket case of a company, and I think it's two things. This is my little diagnosis. I think the product has always been half broken. I think part of the product is definitely engaging. People like the product. People are on there all the time. You can't ignore the fact people spend a huge amount of time on Twitter. However, people also leave. Like the number of people that have used Twitter and left is like 90%. So there's something about this product that's compelling and there's something about this product that's broken. And even today you've only got 200 million users. like Facebook and YouTube and even TikTok, they're up at two billion now. So you've got a good product, but it's fundamentally broken. And then on top of that, you have a very ineffective management team that can't get anything done. They haven't made, they haven't been able to add an edit button. You know, it takes years. And then you've got this bloated, lazy culture. where it basically looks like an adult daycare center. Elon Musk has been tweeting in the last couple of days about he's taking away free lunches because they get free lunches. And he said this was costing like $400 per person per lunch. And someone who worked at Twitter, because he's fired half of them, tweeted in and said, that's not true. I was in charge of this program. It's 20 to $40 per lunch. He tweets back. And he says, no, the average cost works out to be 400 because the percentage of employees that were actually in the office on a daily basis is under 10%. So you have an empty, and they didn't even offer the meals at dinner because there was nobody there. I mean, what kind of company has under 10% of their staff coming in? Even with the COVID thing, the free meals. They have a meditation room. They have a free wine bar. They more or less doubled their staffing in the last five years and has anything improved? And ultimately this is just a software company. When WhatsApp got bought by Facebook for $19 billion, they had 50 employees. Facebook had, I mean, Twitter had 7,500, up from three or 4,000, you know, five years before or something like that. So this is just a bloated company. lazy daycare. It looks like a lot of the bad stuff that happens at US colleges now where it's just these soft, in my opinion, people who don't work that hard, who all get these crazy salaries. That's how it looks to me. So then you get this guy flying in. So here's the pace. The dates are really important. So he takes it over on October 27th. So about three weeks ago. You know, he did the thing where he shows up in the lobby carrying a sink with the joke, let this sink in. It's like a total dad joke. It's not really a good joke. It's so dorky. He goes upstairs. It's on a Friday. He immediately fires the CEO and the senior management and one of them got escorted out of the building by security. He immediately deploys his people from Tesla and SpaceX. So he doesn't show up alone. He shows up with the team. And this is the team. that can land rockets, which nobody could ever do before. This is, you know, these are hardcore engineers. You know, these are not people who have wine bars and bean bags and meditation rooms to relax in. So that's kind of thing. Now that was just one week. With that was day one. Within the first seven days, he fires half the employees within seven days. One week after that, he launches the new verification button. So he mandated a new feature. You can sign up and get your blue check mark. They execute and deploy 10 days. Twitter's never done anything in 10 days. And as I'm doing this podcast, it's on a Tuesday, he's sleeping in the Twitter headquarters. There's pictures of him. He's living in the Twitter headquarters right now. And he's telling people like, if you have ideas, come and talk to me anytime I'm here. Like that is such a tremendous culture shock. That's why supercharging performance, I mean this is really shock therapy, right? This is like where you take your average lazy, stoner high school student you've had enough of as your kid and you put him in the Marines one day. And Monday morning he's getting up at 4 a.m. running for five miles with a shaved head. I mean it's this level of just like shock therapy. So it's absolutely fantastic to watch. Okay, so that's kind of what's going on. Let me break it down. So I'm gonna give you, let's call it two points. Point number one, supercharge operating performance. Point number two, 10x the product, which basically means like the first thing you do is you have to change this company from top to bottom. Just get it running better. Once you get that done, then you try and launch a dramatically improved product or service. such that the value of the company is dramatically better. Right, so a 10x product, a 10x service. I think we can actually see his playbook for both of these. Okay, so if you look at my standard graphic, which I'll put in the show notes, of my six levels of digital competition, it basically, you know, my sort of analogy has been... You have to win at two levels as a digital business. You have to win on operating performance and you have to win at moats and structural advantages. And the symbols I've been using is Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. Elon Musk is arguably the hardest charging operator on the planet. I mean, nobody works like this guy. Well, I mean, I'm sure there are, let's call him the most famous of them. Maybe Bezos and some others that are at this level. but there's a very small group of people who can operate at this level. He's one of them. And then Buffett's more of the, Hey, it's not about working hard. It's about building a structure that nobody can compete with. So those were my two levels. So if we look at what he's doing, we'll call that Twitter 1.0 his first version. He is just supercharging the operating performance of this business. And I gave you seven digital operating basics. I'll put the slide in the show notes. He's going through one, two, three, four, five. He looks like he's going through five of them. If you look at my list, I'll read them to you. It looks like he's doing five of them. That's most everything I see him doing is these five things. So number one. Let's call it DOB5, leadership and management. Okay, he fired them on day one. He's in charge and he brought in his, you know, gung ho team from, I think it's Tesla. I'm not sure, it's probably more Tesla. I don't, Tesla or SpaceX. So digital operating basics five, leadership and management, bam, day one. Okay, digital operating basics number six, people, culture and teams. I think that's why he's been doing this shocking stuff in this first week. I think that's why he's fired. I think that's why he's firing 3,500 people in the first week. Part of it's because it needs to be done. Part of it is because he's shocking the culture. He is letting everybody know, if you want to work like a crazy person, you're welcome to stay. If you don't want to work like a crazy person, I get it. You're welcome to leave. He's gonna fire a lot of people, but a lot of people are gonna leave on their own, because they don't wanna be part of this maniacal culture. And that's why he's doing things like, no more working from home, forget it. And his language on this is like, they had an all hands meeting, and here's a quote, let me be crystal clear, if people do not return to the office when they're able to return to the office, they cannot remain at the company, end of story. That's it. If you can show up in an office and you do not show up in an office, resignation accepted, end of story, unquote. I mean, this is just, now he talks, so let's call that, you know, that's a bit of a shock. But his other quotes are more about you need to have a maniacal sense of urgency, and that's his phrase. So here's a quote, let's take action, I'm a big believer in having just a maniacal sense of urgency. So if you can do it after this meeting, I would do it after this meeting, just a maniacal sense of urgency. Like if you want to get stuff done, just go. Hardcore. Right? So he's sort of doing this idea of changing the culture below the management level, changing the staff. And the way I've heard it talked about, which I think is probably true, he's basically reconstituting the entire staff of Twitter. And he's pulling from two places. He's pulling from the current staff. and then he's pulling from Tesla and SpaceX. But the Twitter that existed two weeks ago is gone. You know, you've got to jump to the new Twitter, but he's not just bringing those people in. Now most companies, I've done some turnaround where I've fired, you know, hundreds of people. The problem when you come into a company like this is if you fire a bunch of people, things start to break, which is true, and then you have to hire people, which takes time. So you tend to be hesitant and not that aggressive. He doesn't have to do that because he can fire like crazy. And if stuff breaks, he's got two other tech companies in his back pocket he can pull people from. Most people, if they fire aggressively, then they have to start up the hiring process and find new people. And sometimes the new people are worse than the current people. He doesn't have that problem. He's got tens of thousands of people in his back pocket he can pull from. So he can be a lot more aggressive. Okay, so that's DOB six, people, culture and teams. DOB two, digital operating basics two, never ending personalization and customer improvements. I mean, this is where you just start and he's been doing this in like in the open on Twitter where he is just floating idea after idea. And he's been telling his staff, you can see it in the meetings. If you have any idea, just send it to me. We want new ideas, we want new ideas, anything. And he changed his bio, his title on his Twitter account to like Chief Complaint Officer. And he basically went on and said, the Chief Complaint Officer for Twitter is now online. Please submit your complaints. And people just started putting hundreds of comments. So he's looking for this, he's beginning the process of never ending, very rapid customer improvements. just make the product better every day, every day, not over six months, every week. And this is what the best software companies do, especially gaming companies are really good at this, where they will release new edits to their game and new features and new improvements every single week. They work at this crazy pace. So that's what he's doing, he's hunting for stuff, and he already pulled the trigger on one. He said, we're gonna do blue check marks for everybody. that'll probably solve the bot problem. He announced it 10 days later, it went live. I signed up, it worked beautifully, right? I mean, Twitter has never moved this fast, but it's also this process of, you know, and here's another quote from him, quote, I very rapidly want to improve every aspect of Twitter. That's digital operating basics number two. It never, and this won't end, it will just keep happening for years. that every week, every two weeks, they just keep making little things better and better and better. And the best digital companies, this is how they behave. Okay, last two. Digital operating basics number one, rapid growth at small incremental cost. Now this is where you start to get to the idea that like, why isn't Twitter 2 billion people? I mean, why not? It's been around for a decade. Like why is it the only social, I mean WhatsApp has it, WeChat has it, they all have it, Instagram has it, you know even Pinterest, I mean why is it so small? And if you're gonna be a software company, one of the biggest benefits of being a software company is you can get global scale without a global cost structure. So if you're a pure software company and you're not global, what's the point? I mean open supermarkets or something. So he's spoken to this a lot that, you know, daily active users, Twitter's about 200 billion. He wants it to be a global platform. Here's his quote, there are 8 billion humans. If we don't have at least a billion humans on the system, then we have a very small percentage of humans. So we want a reasonable percentage. He says, quote, YouTube has 2.6 billion users. Oh, man, we're nothing. So he's clearly going for scale. So this would all be under Twitter 1.0. We're gonna improve things, we're gonna supercharge the management, the culture, and we're gonna go for scale with a moderately improved version of what we have. That to me is Twitter 1.0. The last bit he's talking about is cash flow. He's been talking about cash flow an enormous amount. And it's probably because he borrowed a lot of money to do the acquisition and he paid way too much for it. Now people criticize him on line for this. They say, oh, you levered up, this thing's gonna go bankrupt. You know who really performs as companies? Private equity people who load up companies with debt. You know, the old saying is like, you know, if you load up a company with debt, it's like driving a truck and someone has put a knife coming out of the steering wheel. You are really paying incredible attention. You know, debt is a sword, equity is a pillow. So the fact that he's borrowed money, I think that's just gonna make him more maniacal. So he's been talking a lot about cash flow. One, because I think of the debt. Two, because there's this idea of a recession in the next year. And all the tech companies are firing people right now. Everybody's scaling back and getting ready for this. So he's had some pretty stark words for this. He says, quote, we just definitely need to bring in more cash than we spend. If we don't do that, there's a massive negative cash flow, then bankruptcy is not out of the question. That is a priority. We can't scale to 1 billion users and take massive losses along the way. Right, and digital operating basic seven is basically called, you've got to have a sustainable cash engine that scales. I mean, I put those words in specifically. It's not about just having a cash engine that can pay for itself. You want it to get bigger as you get bigger. And he talked a lot about the recession, quote, I've been through the recession of 2000, 2001, 2008, 2009. This is not, and I'm somewhat paranoid about dying in recessions. I have recession PTSD from keeping X and PayPal alive through the 2000 recession, keeping Tesla alive in the 2009 recession. It's worth remembering in 2009, General Motors and Chrysler both went bankrupt. Tesla did not. Despite being a startup electric vehicle. company. So he's definitely focused on this. He says, I don't know what the revenue shortfall will be next year, but I think it's possible that we could see a net negative cash flow of several billion dollars. So he's focused on cash flow. Anyways, that to me is Twitter 1.0. And I think the digital operating basics and you know, the short version of that is we're going to supercharge operating performance. And if anyone can do it, this guy can do it. So that looks pretty great. And I think that's most of what's been in the news for the past three weeks. With that, let me move on to the next point, which is 10x the product. So Twitter 2.0, or we could call it 2.0 and 3.0. How do you make this company worth dramatically more than it is today? Well, you have to change the product. The product is what it is. Everyone knows what Twitter is. If it gets bigger, that's gonna make it more valuable. If he gets to a billion users, that's great. But how do we make the product fundamentally more valuable? Well, he's pretty much tipped his hand on what the first steps are gonna be. And it looks like it's gonna be a payment platform and an audience builder platform, two of the type we've talked about. So here's what he said in a town hall meeting last week. Quote, I think there's a lot that is very, very obvious that we need to do, like video content and compensating creators in order to get content on Twitter. That's a no-brainer, high priority. Improving search, high priority. We are obviously gonna add payment capability to Twitter. That's a high priority. So he's mentioned at least three things as a high priority. Payment, content creators, and search. But search, he's not talking about a search engine. He's talking about search within Twitter as it exists now. So we'll call that a function, but not a major strategic move. Okay. Twitter is like... I mean, it is an audience builder platform in the sense that people, it's not like Facebook where everyone is just sharing text back and forth. There are certain people who create the vast majority of the content on Twitter, highly followed people. There's a small subset that you could call the content creators. It's not just back and forth conversation with everybody. So in that sense, you could argue this is an audience builder based on text. fine. But those people don't get paid. They don't get any of the ad revenue. And most of those people are posting videos and articles. Not just, hey, I have a funny comment. Okay, but if you post a video and article, they're posting it from YouTube and TikTok and then you post it, the person clicks on it, and it takes you over to TikTok or YouTube. So by not giving content creators the ability to one, get paid for posting on Twitter and also giving them more types of content they can do, not just text. And it's pretty clear he wants to go for short video. So that if you're a content creator on Twitter, you can post tweets and you can post short videos. And That's kind of a no-brainer. So we can call this sort of strategy, him building an audience builder, uh, with connected users, we can call that a copy of TikTok. And that's what he's been talking about is a copy of TikTok. Basically. Um, what does that get you? You basically win, win, win. Number one, it creates a new business model. that is inherently very valuable. YouTube is a tremendously valuable company. So this makes Twitter, the current Twitter, plus a small version of TikTok, or a version of Quaishou. And this is exactly what WeChat did. WeChat's a messenger, but very quickly, Alan Zhang said, the future of WeChat has to be short video, and he created a short video function within WeChat. Because it turns out it's super valuable. But it also gets you more engagement. It gets you more users. People don't spend two hours on Twitter, but people spend 90 minutes watching videos on TikTok. So he wants to get more users. He wants to get more screen time. And to do that, he's gonna add the single most popular type of content right now, which is short video, and the content creators are gonna get paid. I mean, it's just an audience builder. So you could call this. He's gonna copy, he's gonna build a TikTok within Twitter. And they already had a company years ago called Vine, which is where you used to share gifts, like short little memes. Vine could have been TikTok. And here's a funny thing. Vine is about sharing gifts. The main competitor to TikTok in China is Quaishou. Quaishou was Vine. It was a platform for sharing gifts. And then when they saw what was happening, they pivoted into short video. Vine could have done the same thing. So he's already said something like, here's some quotes from him. We also want to expand to be sort of a multimedia platform. We are that to some degree. We are the strongest when it comes to anything that's writing in real time. But we also want to have that for pictures and video, and not in a way that copies what others do. Quote, do we have a compelling short form video as opposed to exactly what Vine was? It's not let's copy Vine from whatever year with ancient code. It's really about how do we have compelling short form video, just compelling content in general. Okay, and then he says, you know, right now content creators cannot post the length of video that they would like to post, then they cannot monetize it. which means they cannot pay their bills. These are not like super complicated things. They're pretty basic. We're not trying to put YouTube out of business, but I'm just saying, do we really need to give YouTube a whole bunch of free traffic? So let's give creators the option if they would like to put their video on Twitter and earn the same amount as they would, or maybe slightly more on YouTube or TikTok, or whatever the case may be. So those are his comments. So he's clearly going after that. Makes all the sense in the world. So that's another business model. Next one, final one, payment platform. He's been talking, this is the one he's actually talking the most detail about because this is the guy that founded PayPal. So he really does understand payment. And he said they had some sort of super business plan they wrote back in 2000 that was gonna be the ultimate payment financial services app. And then they built part of it for PayPal. But he actually talks about, I wrote this business plan in 2000, we never executed most of it. So he's got really detailed comments on what he's gonna do with payment. And he basically says, here's a quote, I think there's this transformative opportunity in payments. And payments really are just the exchange of information. From an information standpoint, not a huge difference between say, just sending a direct message and sending a payment. They're basically the same thing. So basically you can send money to people. which is pretty much what WeChat did. They were a messenger, and WeChat used to say the exact same thing. We can send payments as easily as we can send messages on WeChat. Okay, so let's say he's gonna build a payment platform. Now that can be a very valuable business, but if you look at what Ant Financial did and New Bank did in Brazil, they used payment to leapfrog themselves into a financial services super app. Once you get payment, you can start to add things like checking accounts. money market accounts, credit, and then maybe depending how ambitious you are, you can go into wealth management, you can go into insurance and other things, which is what New Bank is doing in Brazil, what Ant Financial did here. And literally that's what he's talking about. So he said, Here's a quote, then in order to get money out of the system in parallel, we establish a high yield money market account so that having a Twitter balance is the highest yield thing you can do. So let's add a money market account as long as you've got a digital wallet. That's exactly what Alibaba did with U about. That's how they created the world's largest money market account was they said, look, you've already got money on Alipay, instead of letting it sit there in your wallet, why don't you put it in our money market account? Here's more Elon quote, then you attach a debit card to the Twitter account so that you have backwards capability into the payment system because not everyone will accept Twitter. Then if you have a, so basically he's going from payment to money market account to debit card so you can go backwards and forwards compatibility. And then in theory, he could go into credit, financial services, more wealth management products, which is just what these other companies are doing. So second big 10X opportunity, payments. into a money markets account and maybe into a financial services super app. It wouldn't surprise me if he's going to be very aggressive there. That's kind of what he's talked about. One last point and then I'll finish up here. The thing he hasn't talked about, which I think he will, so this is a little bit of a prediction, he's obviously talking about WeChat a lot, that we should copy WeChat. The two things that WeChat has done that he hasn't talked about, number one is adding mini programs. That once you get people in an ecosystem, and you have payment capability, it's very easy to start selling them things by offering all the merchants and brands abilities to put their shops on the platform, which is exactly what tick tock is doing. It's what YouTube is doing. It's what Facebook is doing. Uh, so he's well positioned to move right into e commerce. And that's huge money. I mean, that's, that's a massive opportunity. Uh, and from there, in theory, he could go into search, which is what, um, WeChat is doing right now because they have all the mini programs. You can search the content of all the mini programs, hundreds of thousands of them. So you can do one search engine that searches everything on your smartphone more or less. So that would be the two other big sort of ideas on the horizon. So there's at least four ideas there to 10x the product. And that's about where I am in sort of my thinking on this. One last comment. I always talk about digital operating basics. digital marathons, and then structural advantages modes. What is the digital marathon that he's gonna be running here? That's such that as years go by, he pulls so far ahead, nobody can catch him. Now, when he does Tesla and SpaceX, the digital marathon he's running is sustained innovation. That's the S in SMILE, S-M-I-L-E, SMILE Marathon, actually it's not the S, the I stands for sustained innovation. His rockets keep getting better and better and better such that nobody can build the rockets that does what he does. Now, I don't think that's what he's building at Twitter. I don't think Twitter is a bunch of groundbreaking engineers who are gonna figure out stuff nobody can do. It's a software business and a platform business model. We are not inventing new types of ways of going to Mars. So I think the digital marathon he's gonna run is ecosystem orchestration, which is the E. in Smile and hyper scale and hyper growth. He's gonna basically do what TikTok did, which is we're gonna be a very good ecosystem orchestrator and we're gonna get very, very big. That's the marathon. And when we're up at 2 billion users, we'll be impossible to catch. Something like that. So I would put it under that category, which is a little different for him. Anyways, that's just a little bit more theory. Okay, I think that is enough for content for today. I'll put the graphics in the show notes. The two main concepts for today, digital operating basics and an audience builder with connected users. It's worth looking at the graphic for that second one. And that is it for the content. As for me, it's been... a fun week here in Bangkok. I'm here with my mom, she flew in, so I'm sort of giving her a little bit of a tour around, which is, it's highly amusing. We ended up not going down to the south, we're just gonna stay in Bangkok and Hua Hin probably, but yeah, it's been pretty good. I took her to a pretty good Thai restaurant yesterday, and she doesn't really like spicy food, so she had this funny conversation with the waitress, like, oh, can you please not make it spicy, not too spicy? And she didn't speak any English. She was like, yeah, it's okay. I'm like, yeah, that's not gonna work out. So she got papaya salad. It's like, oh, this is spicy. I'm like, yeah, yeah, everything's pretty spicy. So that was kind of enjoyable for me. And what else? I took her down to the new park, for those of you in Bangkok, near the reservoir, that new sort of wetlands park they opened. So we walked around there. And then I a little bit made a mistake because I was gonna walk back to Sukhumvit. and I didn't really know how to get from the new park to Sukhumvit, so I walked what turned out to be Nana Plaza. I didn't really mean to go down that particular street. So anyways, I took my mom to Nana Plaza apparently, but it was in the afternoon. This is a little bit of a red light district. I didn't really know that that street connected through there, so I'm like, oh, this is not good. So it wasn't bad because it was still late afternoon, but yeah. Just turns out I'm the guy who took his mother to Nana Plaza. So that was kind of entertaining. Yeah, yeah, but apart from that, it's been a pretty good trip. So I think we'll head to Hua Hin tomorrow, drive down there, maybe go up to the national park, which is pretty great. Anyways, that's it for me. A lot of fun. I hope everyone is doing well and I will talk to you next week. Bye-bye.