Elon Musk has already made ~$750 million on his Twitter trade, which is approximately double Twitter’s net income for the last 3 years.
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Ben Thompson
@benthompson
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Being a liberal with forbidden black friends under a censorious apartheid regime that denied its atrocities is a powerful origin story for Musk’s focus on free speech. So powerful, in fact, that this takeaway shines through a ham-fisted narrative insinuating the opposite.
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Elon Musk grew up in elite white communities in South Africa, detached from apartheid’s atrocities and surrounded by anti-Black propaganda.
He sees his takeover of Twitter as a free speech win but in his youth did not suffer the effects of misinformation. nyti.ms/3kG0TNY
1975: Microsoft founded
~22 years later~
1997: US v Microsoft filed
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1998: Google founded
~22 years later~
2020: US v Google filed
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Apparently being sued for antitrust is like graduating from college for tech companies.
The anti-nuclear movement is up there as one of the most destructive of all-time. The triumph of emotion over rationality, and we haven’t even started to truly pay the price.
From: newyorker.com/tech/annals-of
Elon Musk is better at interviewing than at being interviewed, which actually makes quite a bit of sense when you think about it.
Agree. It's 2016 and men in tech still mocking one of the most successful businesspeople in the industry. Hopeless twitter.com/CanadaKaz/stat
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6 year-old son: Where do cows watch movies?
Me: A MOOOOOO-vie theater.
Son: No.
Me: [Surprised] Then where?
Son: MOOOOOO-Tube
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OMG I’m old 😵
Imagine writing this four months after China forced a group of doctors to sign an apology for discussing a new coronavirus in a chat room.
It’s pretty popular to write tweets mocking people starting podcasts. It reminds me of people mocking blogs. It’s all elitist gatekeeper BS. The fact the Internet gives opportunity to anyone anywhere is awesome.
*who was in a control group and didn’t receive the vaccine
Pretty staggering how irresponsible this is.
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Volunteer in Oxford coronavirus vaccine trial dies wapo.st/37sD32R
I have now heard from multiple developers, both big and small, that over the last few months Apple has been refusing to update their app unless their SaaS service adds in-app purchase. If this has happened to you please email me blog @ my site domain. 100% off the record.
Actually, executives that criticize China’s governance have their companies taken away and disappear. Ask Jack Ma.
This is a First Amendment issue, as in private companies can do this because of the First Amendment.
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Silencing people, not to mention the President of the US, is what happens in China not our country. #Unbelievable
I wonder at what point Apple decided to make sure the Stocks app could display a ‘T’ 🤔
Blogs = still the best representation of the Internet’s promise. Everyone should have a site that they own, not just a social media account (which are great for promoting blog posts).
A creator sells a Ticketed Space for $5.
The creator, who people are willing to pay for, gets $2.80.
Twitter, who facilitated the connection and created the product, gets $0.70.
Apple/Google, who leverage OS API control into a tax on all activity, do nothing and get $1.50.
Probably not a great sign that none of the Western media is even covering the Chinese incursion into India, much less condemning it.
Ah yes, I remember visiting the farm as a child and milking an Echo and picking Dots.
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Literally killing people with red tape. Nothing, absolutely nothing, matters more than speed. By obsessing about prioritizing the vaccine we are prioritizing the extension of this pandemic.
I have noticed that when I have calls with people who are used to working from home, we both default to no video. People new to it always have their video on 🤔
Imagine people arguing in 1998 that Microsoft deserves 30% of all software sales with zero alternatives allowed lmao
So just to make sure I understand this, the NYT finds moderating 77k folks too difficult, and also expects perfection from Facebook in moderating 2.7 billion?
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The New York Times is so done with its 77,000-member Facebook cooking group. What happens now? nie.mn/3r22fU1
My daughter deleted an entire report because, after only using Google Docs previously, she had to use Word. She was completely befuddled by the idea of "save", especially because she didn't have a pre-existing folder for her class in the dialog. Finally she just quit the app 😬
None of these folks objected yesterday when I described the reality of structural racism. Today, though, when I defend Facebook’s policy decisions, I should “stay in my lane” 🤔
Everyone knows that if you want to be a successful tech CEO you go to the school that starts with 'H'...
That's right, Hyderabad Public School:
If you’re not watching the lawyer-as-cat video because you’re busy and surely it’s not *that* funny you are mistaken and should in fact watch it right now.
It sounds absurd to tweet it, but the FTC really is suing an American company for eliminating competition while a Chinese company is eating their lunch.
My wife just admitted she doesn’t know how to pronounce “Stratechery”.
Best Apple commercial in years twitter.com/VersaceBoyEnt/
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(And yes, you don’t make money until you sell, and yes, I’m already regretting the replies to this when I wake up…)
If you’re a nobody, opportunity is defined by no one having an advantage. Long Substack, Shopify, Stripe, and every other platform on the Internet that is accessible to anyone. No permission necessary.
Welcome to the “Actually Apple’s App Store is by far the biggest antitrust problem in tech” coalition! It has been an at-times lonely 7 years, but all are welcome.
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2 terribly misguided ‘ē‘s
345 words
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5 years ago today 🎂
stratechery.com/2013/welcome-t
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Companies want innovative thinkers but only hire people who have followed the rules from elementary school on ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apple's chip performance over the last 10 years is legitimately one of the most impressive things in tech history.
Notable to see Apple confirming a point I’ve been trying to make: the company believes it is entitled to *all* commerce that happens on an iPhone.
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No matter what you think of Musk buying Twitter, I think we can all agree that innuendo-filled stories like this are gross.
In all seriousness, I had no idea I’d be mentioned in Apple’s keynote, and missed it live. Credit goes to all of Stratechery’s subscribers that made it possible for a one-person site to get a big publication-style pull quote. The Internet can be pretty cool.
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Is there an Apple event today?
I didn’t write about this this week but it’s a holiday and I’ve had a few drinks.
I’ve long considered a Chinese version of Stratechery. I unequivocally rejected it this week because there is no way I ever want to be remotely compromised by my desire to serve the Chinese market
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Here you go: my breakdown of the BBC-expert-interrupted-by-his-family video:
Didn’t post, because was sure someone had, but haven’t seen it…
"After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment…”
I normally avoid explicitly political posts, but Congress recessing now (House last week, Senate today) is a shocking dereliction of duty. There has to be a massive bias towards action.
"It's not just another streaming service"
It is, in fact, another streaming service.
I wrote about Jio today, and am sad that I didn’t see this really fantastic two-part write-up on the history of Reliance until I had already published. Highly recommended
hind.substack.com/p/reliance-ori
hind.substack.com/p/from-oil-to-
Apple won in hardware by fully leveraging software
(Rewatching, and this keynote only gets more incredible with time)
It’s not that it was premature to ban nuclear: it’s that the failure to heavily invest in nuclear over the last several decades was by far the biggest failure in climate policy, and nothing else comes close.
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This article on Germany's dependence on brown coal really makes me think it was premature to ban nuclear. bbc.co.uk/news/stories-4
The tech industry warned about the impact of the coronavirus in January, closed its offices in WA and CA in early March (to great effect), and has enabled millions to work from home with basically zero hiccups.
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At this point, whenever I see a tech person tweeting a take on coronavirus, I instinctively assume the opposite of what they're saying is true
I've been using Android for the last couple of weeks, and honestly, the core OS is pretty good!
The big problem is that Android apps are garbage relative to iOS apps. If developers actually care about pushing back against Apple they should give a damn. They don't.
Generous of Apple to not claim responsibility for Basecamp’s 1999-2012 revenue.
If I could convince everyone in the world to read and understand one article about COVID it would be this one. FWIW it very closely tracks the understanding I’ve developed over many months now, and explains all of the twists and turns to date.
cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie
42% revenue growth an “utter disaster”
I might need to extend my vacation 🙄
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Replying to @opinion
Facebook's financial results were an utter disaster and user growth is flatlining. What do you think is the cause?
A) People aren't using Facebook very much
B) There’s a ceiling to Facebook’s growth
C) Years of bad headlines about FacebookShow this poll
Hiring is probably the single largest arbitrage opportunity available.
Letting degrees/admissions committees make choices for you is dumb.
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Replying to @mattjay
One of the best static analysis people I hired was delivering pizzas for domino's when I interviewed him. Don't limit your talent pool.
It is ok to say that "Yes you should wear a mask but please save the real ones for health care workers because we are short and wear a cloth one" instead of lying about their efficacy for coronaviruses.
“Trump is banning TikTok because of Tulsa” is a classic example of the right thing being done for the right reasons but perhaps the wrong motivations. Folks really need to get past the third point and realize that the second matters: ByteDance answers to the CCP.
One thing that has become clear to me over the last week is how few people actually understand how podcasting works.
Lesson number 1: iTunes is not a gatekeeper. It’s a directory, a phonebook if you will, that tells you where to download podcasts.
I think my favorite part is the three distinct capitalizations of “iOS”, none of which are correct 😂
Remembering every so-called competition expert who praised Apple’s ATT changes, while accusing people like me raising the red flag about how blatantly anticompetitive it was of being paid shills for Facebook. Fun times.
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Chart of the Day:
@Apple’s advertising business has more than tripled its market share in the six months after it introduced privacy changes to iPhones that obstructed rivals, including @Facebook and @Google, from targeting ads at consumers.
*A Thread*
So, for the folks who told me last week I was grandstanding by saying Spotify was a threat to the open ecosystem of podcasting...
Congratulations to Apple on framing a cost-saving maneuver as an environmental consideration.
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Note to self: don't share interesting anecdotes about kids encountering new computer paradigms for the first time if you don't want a bunch of tweets attempting to teach you how to use a computer 🙄
We have, over the last year, witnessed a modern version of denying Galileo. “Believe science” ought never be conflated with “believe experts”, who got SARS-CoV-2 transmission completely wrong. From :
Apple announcing the iOS 14 release date 24 hours ahead of time as a summer ending gift to developers 🤣
I have a hard time believing that people who read the worst into everything and try to be offended accomplish anything of value.
It’s far better than I expected, and I had high expectations.
Something like this could *never* happen on a podcast. That’s not a dis on podcasts, just a recognition that this is something fundamentally different.
Singapore is getting praised for its handling of COVID-19, but Taiwan deserves credit too, particularly as an example of a society that is open and free and handling the outbreak well because of it.
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(technically Twitter’s last 3.25 years, but they had a charge in there, so included it)
The degree to which Marriott ownership has cheapened the experience of once (and, in terms of the building/location, still) legendary hotels is so disappointing.
It's a shame, but not a surprise, that there are zero acknowledgements of the way in which Facebook ads level the playing field for all kinds of small-and-medium sized businesses and startups.
Leaving aside that none of these actions are illegal, I am very bothered by the readiness of many to suggest that “poaching employees” is a moral wrong.
It implicitly states that people are property, and ought to be denied their value in the market.
I have special disdain for subscription-based businesses that make it hard to cancel. They’re peeing in the pot for the rest of us.
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NYT: dark patterns are the techniques that companies use online to get consumers to keep subscriptions they might otherwise cancel
Also NYT: if you want to cancel your NYT subscription, you have to call this phone number during our business hours & let us talk you out of it
The continual carping for a Twitter edit button after years of complaining that tech companies don’t consider unintended consequences never ceases to blow my mind.
Twitter’s habit of creating new kinds of notifications and automatically opting you in, even though you have notifications turned off, remains one of the single most user-hostile engagement number juicers I’ve ever seen.
My 6yo on smartphones in 2018:
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Son: Can you get phones that have “Hey Google”?
Me: Yes, but not iPhones. They have “Hey Siri”
Son: But “Hey Google” is better
Me: So do you want “Hey Google” when you get a phone?
Son: But I want Apple too.
***
#NailedIt
Rest In Peace Professor Christensen.
An intellectual hero and an inspiration.
I would really really really like to know if any company has actually run the numbers on whether the operational benefits from "Select traffic light" CAPTCHAs are worth the real customer pain they impose, particularly for paid services.
I don’t particularly like many of ’s tweets either but you’re nuts if you think Basecamp is deliberately putting a multi-million investment at risk just so they can get free publicity. No one saw this block coming given what seemed to be settled law in the App Store.
Have to respect Bill Gates still refusing to use an iPhone because of “its lack of flexibility” 🤣
A reminder that the iPhone 3GS had a lower screen resolution (480x320) than a 44mm Apple Watch (448x368)
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Just found this screenshot of Uber from 2011 on my iPhone – 4 cars in all of NYC! (and no, that's not my address)
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The 2020 Stratechery Year in Review.
The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2020.
Spot on.
More broadly, it’s hard to think of a more disastrous policy in nearly every regard than willful deindustrialization. We decimated entire regions of the country for this?
I definitely regret having bought into that logic when I was young.
The hero of February was the Seattle Flu Study, which raised the alarm about community spread; the villain was the FDA, which refused to allow private companies to develop tests.
Incredibly, the FDA is doubling down.
Journalists equivocating between Facebook and China — or even favoring the latter — is not going to age well. And this isn't a defense of Facebook.
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Superior employees are black swans. They're also often the least likely to follow the prescribed path your hiring practices screen for.
Ideas are free but “Source: Credit Suisse” is a bit much
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@benthompson Credit Suisse blatantly copying your work and not providing credit where credit is due.
