The relevance of Twitter does not originate in generating the biggest number of eyeballs on advertisements (it doesn't do well at all in that regard).
Twitter is relevant because a very specific audience of multipliers (particularly journalists, but also other influential public figures) use Twitter - often in person, while some marketing company runs their Facebook account. The public reach that Twitter can potentially provide is much bigger than that of any other social network, even though those networks may nominally have a multiple of the number of users of Twitter.
Musk gets this, and it is why he is interested in Twitter. The market doesn't get it, which is why it undervalues Twitter. However, you cannot blame the market for that; it is poised to undervalue Twitter, because the actual value of Twitter is not accessible to just anybody, but people like Musk, who are well-connected in the Twitter social graph. Hence the value of Twitter to someone like Musk is actually much larger than the value of the exact same Twitter to any random shareholder.
> Musk gets this, and it is why he is interested in Twitter.
You think this is why he's interested. He has not actually said this, correct?
Another plausible explanation is that it is his preferred social media and its (relatively) cheap because it is very poorly run and thus its growth and financials suck.
You maybe right about Twitter having outsized relevance with respect to its user base, but I'm absolutely not buying that "the public reach that Twitter can potentially provide is much bigger than that of any other social network". Meta's platforms reach BILLIONS of people.
Yes, but most of these are leafs on the (imaginary) unified global social graph.
Twitter's active users are much more likely to not be leafs, but multipliers, some able to reach even people completely out of reach of any social network (by transporting a story over to other media, like print or TV). And considering that even Facebook only has a minority of the world's population among its gigantic user base (and an even smaller minority among its active users), the ability to reach out to other media through Twitter is extremely valuable, in my opinion even more valuable than the ability to reach the giant Facebook user base directly.
Twitter is relevant because a very specific audience of multipliers (particularly journalists, but also other influential public figures) use Twitter - often in person, while some marketing company runs their Facebook account. The public reach that Twitter can potentially provide is much bigger than that of any other social network, even though those networks may nominally have a multiple of the number of users of Twitter.
Musk gets this, and it is why he is interested in Twitter. The market doesn't get it, which is why it undervalues Twitter. However, you cannot blame the market for that; it is poised to undervalue Twitter, because the actual value of Twitter is not accessible to just anybody, but people like Musk, who are well-connected in the Twitter social graph. Hence the value of Twitter to someone like Musk is actually much larger than the value of the exact same Twitter to any random shareholder.