Tame Twitter: Make It Anonymity-Free and a 501(c)(3)

Twitter's embrace of Elon Musk's $44 billion bid feels like a game of chicken between a freight train and a tricycle.

Musk just lined up $7.1 billion in financing last week, including $1 billion from his pal, Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The last time Ellison pumped $1 billion into an Elon exercise, it was Tesla in January 2019, and it turned into $13 billion a year later.

This fundraise is rhetorical. Elon Musk's net worth ($237B) is more than six times Twitter's market cap ($36B). The mystery is why buy Twitter at all, given its feeble finances.

Twitter had $5 billion in revenue in 2021 and lost almost $500 million. It had to pay out $809 million to settle shareholder lawsuits for manipulating daily-user data in 2015. Despite these lapses, this year Twitter will pay $900 million in stock compensation to its staff.

Future robust growth is unlikely. Twitter, started in 2006, now has 217 million daily users. Snap started five years later and has 319 million active users; TikTok started five years after that, in 2016, and has 1.1 billion users.

If profit were the real motive here, Elon should put his $44 billion into Facebook, which earned almost $40 billion on more than $117 billion in sales last year. Facebook trades at less than 5 times annual revenue per share vs. 88 times for Twitter, and FB stock is at 16 times earnings per share vs. 180 times for Twitter.

Yet Facebook has nine times as many active users and almost triple the revenue per user ($60 a year vs. $23 for Twitter.)

For Twitter, this takeover, it can be argued, would be well-deserved. It bans conservatives and welcomes the despots of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, and purportedly even terrorist groups.

How to reform Twitter and its finger-wagging, comically liberal mentality? From my seat as a former editor and Twitter user since 2009, here are seven reforms:

• End anonymity on Twitter. It is the scourge of the internet, letting cowardly assailants lie and libel with impunity. People behave better when they can be identified and found.
• Move Twitter out of Silicon Valley and into the heartland: Texas or Florida.
• Remake the company into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Eliminating the drive for profit growth eliminates the need to spark engagement by promoting conflict.
• Get rid of fact-checking, or provide left-vs.-right versions. Twitter kept outsourcing this to mainstream media outlets as if they were fair and balanced. Hilarious.
• Create a Truth Commission and reveal all internal deliberations on banned accounts— and restore President Trump's account. The more he speaks out, the more opposition he stirs to neutralize his worst tendencies.
• Open up Twitter's algorithms and reveal how slanted they were against conservatives. Set up an independent panel to oversees the algos — especially in election years.
• Ghettoize the platform in a good way. Set up departments for Politics & Policy; Media Feeds; Foreign Government Views, maybe even a red-light district for Enemies, Conspiracy Theories, and Fringe Groups. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Some of this is personal. As an anchor at Fox Business, I held conservative views, and when I left, Twitter was my preferred media outlet. Yet my following never has approached 8,000 people. Twitter twice has rejected me for the coveted blue-checkmark "verification." My unceasingly brilliant tweets die like a tree falling in a desolate forest.

Clearly, Twitter must be muzzling me, too. Elon, please get to the bottom of this.

Dennis Kneale, @denniskneale on Twitter, is a writer and media strategist in New York. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, the managing editor of Forbes, and an anchor at CNBC and Fox Business. Read Dennis Kneale's reports — More Here.