Elon's Beef with Gravity Continues to Cook 🚀😡

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Happy Wednesday, folks.

Have also done a bit of format experimentation, primarily splitting what was once a once weekly, 3 story email to 3 shorter emails covering 1 story apiece. Open rates improved, but given the switch also coincided with my purging of inactive readers, I can’t definitively say that the content switch was the cause. Literally broke rule 1 of 7th grade science, “only change one variable at a time.”

So, rather than drive myself crazy trying to decipher, I figured why not just ask? 🙂 

Also, in my haste to get my OpenAI thoughts out there before some news broke that would require me to rewrite the full thing, I didn’t make the post very reader-friendly. If you took a look at the imageless and massive blocks of uninterrupted text and said “nope,” you now have the opportunity to read yesterday’s free premium version without giving yourself a migraine.

Heads up, it also went out pre-last night’s announcement that Sama was back in the saddle, but given that this was the rumor I had already been hearing, I wrote it assuming that would happen, so it’s still relevant.

Enjoy🫡

Elon Musk: Rockets, Advertisers, and Algos, Oh My

You know what they say about gravity.

It really brings you down.

Just ask Elon, who has had a beef with the universal law on par with Kobe and Shaq. This past weekend, SpaceX tested whether second time's the charm for its Starship launch, attempting to avoid another “rapid unscheduled disassembly” after its first attempt suffered such a fate.

Unfortunately, the second one also broke apart like poorly put together Legos, but this time, the flight lasted a full 8 minutes, which is like an hour in dog years. Even better, unlike Take One, all 33 of the engine boosters managed to fire, quite the milestone.

Now, the FAA will launch another investigation into what went wrong once the ship was in the air, and following another greenlight, the company will be able to get back to work as it attempts to post up on the Moon by 2025.

In the world of social, Musk decided that X CEO Linda Yaccarino was looking a bit too comfortable in her corner office, so he opted to make things a bit more exciting.

First, Musk announced plans to update the algo last week to help promote smaller accounts and allow quality content to thrive, no matter how many followers the poster has. Ideally, this would allow for the sort of ungated filtering process that has helped to make TikTok more successful as follower counts don’t serve as the first barrier for posts to gain impressions.

More and more, we are seeing social companies catering to the creator economy, offering anyone the chance to capitalize and profit from their high-quality content as platforms race to be the preferred medium for the top creators.

This highlights three things for startups in the space:

• Some of the biggest, most well-known companies in the world are betting big on the staying power of the creator economy

• There is an all-out arms race for attracting creators, so any new entrants better come prepared with goodie bags full of incentives for users

• The power of local and small creators has been severely undervalued and can be channeled for scaling efforts

Not everything that Linda was dealing with was positive, though, and while she might have used a bit of water to feed these seeds of long-term growth, she emptied the entire tank trying to put out the fire caused by Elon’s message of support for a post claiming that members of the Jewish community were anti-white. Okay, Kanye.

Musk’s tendency to shoot first, ask questions later has landed him in hot water in the past, and he seems to have a kink for being unconventional, so much so that the bit itself is becoming a bit conventional if you ask me.

Not all of these questionable decisions have come with the immediate financial ramifications of the latest episode, though, as companies from Apple to IBM announced they were done with ads on the platform after the post, a move which seems particularly devastating given the company’s well-documented struggling ad numbers and valuation plummet.

Luckily for him, not all advertisers are pulling out, and surprise surprise, a trending topic on the platform has been the proliferation of Conservative ads (turns out that Linda’s son is in charge of selling ad spots to these organizations…) and even algorithmic biases that funnel users into consuming Right Wing content, even if they do not interact with any organically.

Once again, these latest Twitter stories seem to highlight the opportunity that exists for text-based social media platforms, though we’ve yet to see any of the companies looking to capitalize on this really take off.

Also, advertising can be a tough game. Companies are very conscious of their brand image, so placing it next to Nazi propaganda might not make your company contact very happy. Just so you know :)

[Rec]

Cheers to another day,

Trey