Musk Twitter
While there is still a lot of uncertainty about Elon Musk buying Twitter, what is Musk’s vision if he does buy Twitter?according toFundraising brief obtained by The New York TimesMusk’s expectations for Twitter are really not too big.
First, Musk wants to grow Twitter’s 217 million users by the end of 2021 to 600 million in 2025 and 931 million in 2028. This means that Musk hopes to quadruple the number of users in 6 years. Musk also plans to launch a paid service called “X” and increase the number of subscribers to 104 million. Musk didn’t provide details on what exactly this “X” is, but the bigger chance is some kind of paid, ad-free Twitter experience.
As for the income part, Musk also set extremely high goals. He believes that by 2028, Twitter’s annual revenue can increase from the current about 5 billion US dollars to more than 5 times to 26.4 billion US dollars, and the proportion of in revenue will be halved from the current 90% to 45%. That means about $12 billion in ad revenue, $10 billion in subscriber revenue, and a small portion from things like online payments. Regarding the latter, Twitter’s shopping and tipping features are currently only generating very limited revenue, and Musk hopes to expand this to about $15 million next year and to $1.3 billion in 2028.
To achieve this goal, Twitter naturally needs more paid members. Musk predicted 69 million Twitter Blue users by 2025, expanding to 159 million by 2028. Twitter Blue, a new subscription service that just launched last November, costs $3 a month and offers ad-free news articles, unsent tweets, and other small services. Musk’s separate discussion of X services and Blue’s claims clearly do not overlap in function, but paid subscription services seem to be an important means for Twitter to achieve its revenue goals in the future.
The thing is, it’s very difficult for a company as mature as Twitter to quadruple its users and quadruple its revenue in five or six years, and Musk seems to be offering more here. It’s “believe me”, not a really sound and sound plan. But obviously $44 billion isn’t a small number even for the richest person in the world, and Musk always has something he wants to achieve, right?