Can Elon Turn the Twitter Ship Around?

Alex Lieberman: We have an emergency podcast. This is not the typical Crazy Ones episode, but there's big news, which means it's time for some big conversation. Today, Jesse, Sophia, and I are going to be talking about the basically only thing that is definitely on Twitter, but also in most media publications. And that is Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and kind of all of the different things and shenanigans that are going on in the background around how he's going to turn the ship around.

Sophia Amoruso: This Halloween party I was going to after this metal show on Saturday, and I was dressed for a metal concert, but I think I probably looked like I was wearing costume. And my friend texted me and she was like, "Elon's here." And I was like, "What?" And I show up and she was like, "Oh, he's over there." And he disappeared. And then Jason Calacanis is standing at the bar by himself, who's a friend. And I was like, "Hey." He was like "Yeah, we're flying to New York tomorrow to fix Twitter. Yep, Sunday."

Jesse Pujji: The life of Sophia Amoruso, man.

Alex Lieberman: So let's do this thing. What's up, everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman.

Sophia Amoruso: And I'm Sophia Amoruso.

Jesse Pujji: Yo, this is Jesse Pujji.

Alex Lieberman: And this is The Crazy Ones. So here's the rundown. I'm going to give just a quick chronology of what's basically happened with Twitter over the last several months to get us to where we are today. We're gonna play a fun game where if we were in the driver's seat of Twitter, how would we basically run the business? We each only have 90 seconds to give our answer, and then we're going to just discuss what entrepreneurs can learn from how Elon is going about running this business while also running SpaceX and Tesla and having a lot of other shit going on, like going to Halloween parties with his mom. Quick chronology. March 14, 2022, Elon reached a 9.4% stake in Twitter. He started accumulating that stake in January. April 5, Elon took a seat on the board of Twitter. April 10, he did a quick reversal, said he wouldn't join the board. Also, my sister's birthday. Happy birthday, Sydney.

April 14, Musk offers to buy Twitter for $54 a share, or $54.20. The deal is kind of moving forward, and then it goes on hold. There's basically all this debate about spam. Twitter claimed for the longest time that their user numbers are within 5% of it being right or real. And Elon basically started getting whiffs of there being way more spam and bots on Twitter than he thought Twitter indicated. October 4, it seems like the deal is back on. Elon says he is going to buy the business at $54.20 a share. And on October 28, so that was last Friday, the deal closed. That is what got us...

Jesse Pujji: And in between those two things, he walked away fully. He said, "No way. I'm not buying this." They sued the crap out of him because they had agreed to something. And there's this Delaware Chancery Court, which is a court literally to deal with these specific issues, that basically said he had to buy it. That's kind of a crazy part of the story to me.

Sophia Amoruso: I didn't think it was going to happen.

Alex Lieberman: Did you think it was going to happen?

Jesse Pujji: I did not.

Sophia Amoruso: I did not think it was going to happen. It all just seemed like such an outlandish kind of charade and maybe a way to get followers, I don't know. Or market Tesla, or market anything. That level of news, it's amazing that there's someone rich enough to upend the news cycle and cause an emergency episode of a podcast like this.

Jesse Pujji: It's the Trump playbook, man.

Sophia Amoruso: It's super impressive. Yeah, it's the Trump playbook. And there's a lot of reasons that he could be doing this, and owning Twitter apparently is the reason. But I think we were all a little confused and skeptical of whether or not he was serious about that.

Alex Lieberman: I just picture what happened...

Jesse Pujji: Well, Trump won the election too, so maybe he didn't actually want to get it. He just decided not to take it.

Alex Lieberman: It seems like this big legit deal from the front. But I feel like behind the curtain, the way that I visualize this whole thing is you have Elon one day taking a dump in his home. And he hits up his FA and he's like, yo, Twitter doesn't know what they're doing. Can we just buy a shit ton of Twitter stock? Let me get involved and start trying to get them to actually run their business the right way. And it progressively spirals because he is like, wow, these people have no idea what they're doing. Then he's like, oh shit, I'm buying this thing. Do I actually want to buy this thing? And then he's lying in his bed one night looking at the ceiling, thinking about his Falcon rockets and his production of cars. And he is like, yeah, I don't want to run this thing. And then they started talking about the poison pill and stuff and he is like, shit, I may actually have to run this thing.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. But also, take a second. He has been running the Trump playbook, and it's not a political comment. It's just, Trump learned how to tweet, how to get the media covering him, and how to get his name known. And Elon runs the same thing. I had a funny episode myself running this a few years ago. If you Google Ampush and McKinsey, there's an article by TechCrunch, which describes Ampush as the McKinsey of growth marketing. And I literally, before the call with the reporter, I was like, many people are calling us the McKinsey of growth marketing. Nobody had ever called us that. Let's be clear. But now everybody calls us that. And that's exactly like what Trump and Elon...There's a self-fulfilling...use the media, say a thing that everyone keeps remembering until it actually becomes reality. And ever since Trump did it, lots of other people are doing it.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah. Sophia, I know you're not the biggest Twitter user. Do you think this is going to change your thoughts on the platform, or are you going to be an avid tweeter once Elon turns the ship around?

Sophia Amoruso: I mean, for some reason it feels like Twitter's just more relevant all of a sudden. Not that it wasn't before. You guys are extremely relevant and I consume so much information on Twitter. I think finding time to create tweet threads and turn my newsletter into a reel, into a tweet thread, into a LinkedIn post, I gotta figure out some kind of, what's it called? Generative AI.

Jesse Pujji: We gotta get you some peeps.

Sophia Amoruso: I need some generative AI to deal with that, which...that's for another episode. I want to use Twitter more. And if Elon Musk is touching anything, and again, I have a lot of conflicting opinions about this, but I drive a Tesla. I don't know, I'm curious about rockets and space. If this guy takes anything on, he's taking real moon shots. And even if it blows up, it's probably going to be way more interesting than whatever was happening at Twitter.

Alex Lieberman: Well, so let's talk about the interesting stuff. Let's talk about what he's already said they're gonna do. And then we're going to be put on the shot clock and talk about if we were in Elon's shoes, what we'd do. So in the last 24 hours, basically it's been, I guess announced, Elon tweeted it and then every publication picked it up, that people are going to have to pay $8 a month for Twitter Blue. And basically Twitter Blue is going to get you priority in replies, mentions, and search. It's going to give you the ability to post long video and audio. You get half as many ads. You'll be able to get publishers' content for free. And from Elon's point of view...

Jesse Pujji: And you'll get the blue check mark, most important.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you're going to get the blue check mark. And a large part of the way that he framed this, even on Twitter, and we can put up the tweet, is he's basically, it's like been this kind of war game of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And it's been kind of this political game of who's the person in Twitter partnerships that you know that you can hit up to give you the check mark. And that's kind of bullshit, which I agree with. Elon also will say, this isn't just a monetization strategy. It's also a strategy to solve what he would call the biggest problem, which is the spam and bot problem. Which if you use Twitter with any level of frequency, you know it's a huge issue. I don't fully understand how this is going to solve the problem, which we can maybe discuss that.

Jesse Pujji: I saw you tweeted that. I think the obvious answer, by the way, is just if you have to pay, paid answers get moved up higher, it becomes more expensive to basically show. And so by definition, spam will get pushed down to the bottom unless people start paying a lot of money for it. I think that's a simple...

Alex Lieberman: Sure. Sure, but what if, again, 90% of people aren't paying for Twitter Blue? Then you have the vast majority of spam accounts are just mixed in with the vast majority of real accounts.

Sophia Amoruso: I mean, the whole idea is to democratize everybody's ability to weigh in on things, to access news. And now we're saying that because there's a few people who have blue check marks, which actually helps differentiate people who maybe weren't more well-known or people that you want to follow when you look through your feed, maybe that's a service to the end user who's not paying for it. But now you're making everybody pay for it, which seems like really something that only serves the bourgeoisie.

Alex Lieberman: It'll just be very interesting to see how many people actually pay for this. I think it's going to be less than 10%, but it's also all a function of what's actually bundled in the product that makes it worth it.

Jesse Pujji: 10%, by the way, is what? 20 million people paying eight bucks a month? That's like, he's grown the topline by 50%.

Sophia Amoruso: Bumble does that. There's verified accounts, and you can search people via verified accounts, but they don't make you pay for it.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, 10% is meaningful.

Sophia Amoruso: It's a service to the other users. It's a better product as a result. It's not something that the users should pay for to have a better experience, to reach real people. That shouldn't be our responsibility.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. Austin Allred had a really good post where he was like, there should be a gold level where you're paying thousands a month. And he talked about how much value he's gotten from the platform. I would happily pay thousands a month, especially if it came with more tools and other ways to grow the businesses that...

Alex Lieberman: I think, yeah, totally. And to that, yes, I think you can charge some individuals that, but why not also charge businesses that, who have business accounts on Twitter.

Jesse Pujji: I'm sure they will. Let's go to the 90-second shot clock, man.

Alex Lieberman: Okay. Okay. I just want to finish the facts, and then we'll go to the 90-second shot clock. So we have the $8 a month for the blue check mark. People had originally said $20. Then Stephen King got really pissed about it. Now it's $8.

Sophia Amoruso: Finally, a Stephen King story with a good ending, with someone's response to his angry tweet about having to pay.

Alex Lieberman: I wish I was well read in Stephen King, so I understood that, because I know who he is, but I haven't read one of his books. The other thing Elon did is he's pulled together this tight-knit group of advisors to make product decisions. So he has Jason Calacanis who's been involved, who now actually has a Twitter email address, I read. What?

Sophia Amoruso: I ran into Jason. My friend texts me, there's this Halloween party I was going to after this metal show on Saturday, and I was dressed for a metal concert, but I think I probably looked like I was wearing costume. And my friend texted me and she was like, "Elon's here." And I was like, "What?" And I show up and she was like, "Oh, he's over there." And he disappeared. And then Jason Calacanis is standing at the bar by himself, who's like a friend. And I was like, "Hey." He was like "Yeah, we're flying to New York tomorrow to fix Twitter. Yep, Sunday."

Jesse Pujji: The life of Sophia Amoruso, man.

Sophia Amoruso: I guess I got...I know his movements.

Alex Lieberman: Did you see...

Jesse Pujji: You were in the room where it happened?

Sophia Amoruso: He was excited. He's excited, but he's also just like this fast talker who's like...blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, yeah.

Jesse Pujji: Game face.

Alex Lieberman: Definitely, option your style to him.

Sophia Amoruso: Game face for the party. Yeah, he's working.

Alex Lieberman: So yeah, J-Cal, I was gonna say, you have more of the scoop than us. J-Cal was involved in this. He had pictures from Twitter's office. David Sacks, who was part of the PayPal mafia, was the COO, I believe, of PayPal, obviously, knows Elon from that.

Jesse Pujji: Founder of Yammer, CEO of Yammer.

Alex Lieberman: Yep.

Sophia Amoruso: Sriram Krishnan, who runs Andreessen's Crypto Fund now.

Alex Lieberman: He used to be at Twitter, right?

Sophia Amoruso: He was at Twitter.

Jesse Pujji: And Facebook. And I think he's an amazing product guy.

Sophia Amoruso: Yeah, he's amazing.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all these people got together, I think, to make some of these big decisions around where the product's gonna go, maybe some personnel decisions. Layoffs are coming. Some employees have already been let go. Original murmurings were as high as 75%. Now, the most recent number I've seen thrown around is 25%. Managers have been asked to rate high and low performers in the business. And then the other just kind of big piece to this, which has happened in the last few days, and I think this is a big reason why Elon is in New York right now, I believe, is potential advertisers have been talking about pulling dollars away from Twitter.

So IPG, which is one of the large holding companies, $9 billion in net revenue in 2021, told their clients to consider halting spend on Twitter. And so GM has already halted spend. And some of IPG's clients include Spotify, AmEx, J&J. So Elon's taking meetings right now to try and calm advertisers from pulling out. Obviously that's really important. And they lost their, call it CRO, chief customer officer, yesterday. So those are the big things happening. Now let's put ourselves in the captain's seat. Jesse, you are the most eager. So we're gonna set the clock.

Sophia Amoruso: Speaking of McKinsey.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, yeah. What was it? The McKinsey Agency?

Jesse Pujji: All right. Tell me when I can start.

Sophia Amoruso: Come on, McKinsey.

Alex Lieberman: Okay, I'm setting a timer now. One second. Ready? Okay. So you are Elon Musk. It is November 1, 2022. What's your game plan?

Jesse Pujji: It starts as a math problem, which is, I bought this thing for $44 billion. For it to be considered a success, I probably have to exit or take it public at a hundred billion. So a hundred billion means I have to target making $10 billion in EBITDA, in income, and probably growing at a reasonable rate, similar to Facebook, to get a 10x multiple. Maybe you could get away with six or seven. And I'm like, all right, I probably have three to five years to get there before I lose interest or other people lose interest. So I have to make a game plan that's gonna get me there, which means by the end of next year, I'd be like, okay, well, right now I think the business is at $5 billion in topline and no EBITDA, negative EBITDA. So I have to figure out a bunch of ways to basically get it to 20 or 30.

Facebook has an operating margin of 40%, so let's just say to get to 10, I gotta be at like $25 billion in topline, and I have to figure out how to get to $25 billion. And so there I've started to identify what are the fastest, most impactful, cheapest, easiest ways to get there. One way is you have a lot of people, and they're getting value: Charge them a subscription. They're already doing that. That's one. Another one would be businesses and how can businesses engage on the platform? I've like, with GrowthAssistant, we've grown to millions in revenue from leveraging Twitter for leads. How do they get a piece of that? They've got nothing of that, by the way. And so is it business accounts, but there's charging businesses. They're charging users, charging businesses, and then of course advertising. And advertising...I could go talk forever on advertising.

Alex Lieberman: Seven seconds.

Jesse Pujji: Go hire Facebook's best algo person, and put them in charge of your ads business. Boom.

Alex Lieberman: Okay, Jesse Musk, timer goes. That was solid. So it's interesting how you approached it. You did it from a very, not just reverse engineering the outcome, but a very numbers-based outcome, which, to be honest, we'll wait till I go, but I don't think that's how Elon thinks about things. He's not like a banker sitting on the 40th floor with a spreadsheet, I don't think. But I...

Jesse Pujji: I think he's both, right? I think he's more than that than we think he is.

Alex Lieberman: It's possible. But yes, I mean, I think the biggest thing that...

Jesse Pujji: You kind of have to become one when you borrow $13 billion and buy a $44 billion business with $20m of your own.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah...he has a long leash, though. But I think the big thing is $10 billion in EBITDA, $30 billion, let's say topline, $30b to $40 billion. We're talking about a business that did $5 billion in '21. So yeah, you can't just even focus on the core business of advertising, which is still small relative to other social platforms. It's like that has to have jet fuel on it. And you need three new lines of business that you haven't created out of thin air.

Jesse Pujji: And user growth. I mean, I didn't say user growth, but I'll cheat and say there has to be a lot of user growth.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, I mean, just from a user perspective, their main metric is MDAU. MDAU, monetized or monetizable daily active users. It's basically anyone who can view an ad on a daily basis. They have 229 million MDAUs. For context, Facebook, their daily active user count methodology may be a little bit different, is 1.968 billion. So yeah, I mean they're small, relatively speaking compared to Facebook, Instagram, even TikTok now. Okay, Sophia, you ready?

Sophia Amoruso: Sure.

Alex Lieberman: Okay, one second. I'm setting the clock.

Sophia Amoruso: Oh, no.

Alex Lieberman: Okay, Elon, what are you going to do? And we start now.

Sophia Amoruso: Well, first I just wouldn't do it, because I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be a multibillionaire. I think it makes you weird. It's like what's left after you buy everything? Nothing means anything. You have yachts. You go to Capri, you stay at Le Sirenuse, and you have weird polyamorous...it's not weird, okay, I'm sorry. But it just becomes like, okay, my wife isn't enough. I'm gonna get a divorce, then I'm going to pursue orgies. Like, I know these guys. I know these guys. These guys created...I'm not going to tell you who. And it's like, yeah. Anyway, so everything kind of loses meaning. So then it's like, where do you go? Okay, well the outer frontiers of kink, and what I consider freedom, and then I want to control the media, right?

Jesse Pujji: Are you filibustering right now, Sophia? Talk about Twitter.

Sophia Amoruso: Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, and Marc Benioff bought Time. And it's like the people who control the media control public sentiment. And not that Elon really needs to do that. He has, I don't know how many, a bazillion, over a hundred million followers on Twitter, but I wouldn't want to walk in and have to do that. Why would you pay to turn a company around? I'm also not capable of it, so I can't answer your question. I had a hard time running a team of 250 people. Again, I probably should have hired Jesse or someone from McKinsey or Bain to help me fix that. Ope!

Jesse Pujji: Time's up.

Alex Lieberman: Wow.

Jesse Pujji: Sophia's going to run for Senate next.

Alex Lieberman: And her platform will a hundred percent be anti-polyamory.

Sophia Amoruso: It's okay. It's okay. It's not cheating.

Alex Lieberman: Well, I just want to clear one thing up, is you said if given the choice you wouldn't be a multibillionaire. Do you actually believe that?

Sophia Amoruso: Yeah, I mean there was a time where my feet didn't touch the ground. I wasn't a multibillionaire, but I was worth a lot more than I am on paper. And every door swung open, and everything I wanted I could have at the time, or everything I had time to want I could have at the time. I think it's probably even more dangerous when you're a billionaire who has time on their hands. My god. And I think that not having manifested for me in some ways has kind of brought me back down to earth. I've heard, and this doesn't happen to everybody, and I've always been really grounded in a lot of ways, but I also think it's hard not to be out of touch when you have that much money. I have a friend of mine who has a business that's a unicorn...whether or not it's that or not, it's not direct to consumer anymore, 'cause, hmm. And I saw her once recently, and they had flown private to this destination that I also happened to be…

Alex Lieberman: They took the PJ.

Sophia Amoruso: …at the time. And I was like, "How was your flight?" And they were like, "We flew private." And I was like, "Oh man. Oh man. I mean, that sounds great." I don't really want more. It's a problem in my life. And I'm not a billionaire, but I was like, ugh, of all the things, that would be really great. And she's engaged to a billionaire, so there's that. And she was like, "Honestly, it's the best. I would live in a two and a half million dollar house if I could keep flying private." And I was just like...

Jesse Pujji: What a trade-off.

Sophia Amoruso: I'm so glad that's not me. I'm so glad that's not me.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah. What's above first world problems? Wow.

Jesse Pujji: All right, your turn, dude.

Alex Lieberman: Okay.

Jesse Pujji: You want me to set the timer or are you going to set your own timer?

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, you set the timer.

Jesse Pujji: Okay, hold on. This is, by the way, how I get my kids to comply with anything. I'm like, you have to brush your teeth. How much time do you want?

Alex Lieberman: I honestly, I feel like I'm in debate club right now, and I have my stickies with my point of view.

Sophia Amoruso: Did I win?

Jesse Pujji: Ready? You won. I don't know if you won this contest, but you won some contest. Okay, ready, and...go.

Alex Lieberman: Okay, I have a six-step plan for Twitter being the greatest super app on planet Earth. Number one, learn the business. Number two, avoid catastrophe. Number three, reiterate the mission. Number four, create a plan. Number five, fix the culture. And number six, execute a plan. First, learn the business. That's what I believe Elon has been doing since he maybe made the crucial mistake of saying he wanted to buy Twitter, up until today with meeting with his close council of advisors. A nice thing is that I would say usually 10%, maybe, of people in the business drive 90% of the outcomes in the business. So he really doesn't have to meet with that many people to know what's going on. The reason he's learning the business is to avoid catastrophe. At the end of the day, you need to know what is important in the business in order to know what a catastrophe looks like. And catastrophe, as of right now, is people not enjoying the experience of Twitter and advertisers fleeing.

Jesse Pujji: 30 seconds.

Alex Lieberman: Reiterate the mission. At the end of the day, Twitter is the town square of the internet. He needs to reiterate that so people know where they're headed. That is what Elon's about. The plan is simple. He needs to increase revenue. He needs to cut costs. How does he increase revenue? Grow advertising. How does he grow advertising? He has more people spending time on the platform and better advertising units. He has to cut costs. He has to do more with less. And Twitter's infamous for literally doing nothing to their product forever. And so I think he has the ability to do that.

Sophia Amoruso: That was 60 seconds? It felt like three minutes.

Jesse Pujji: It was 90.

Sophia Amoruso: How did you do that?

Alex Lieberman: It was 90. I did 90 for everyone.

Jesse Pujji: This whole thing has been 90, Senator.

Sophia Amoruso: Excuse me. Wow. You had that much to say?

Alex Lieberman: Is she switching from the Dean to the Senator?

Sophia Amoruso: That much to say.

Jesse Pujji: I've never seen somebody filibuster like that before.

Sophia Amoruso: Yeah. I'm like, this debate isn't fair.

Jesse Pujji: Let's think about this question at hand before we answer.

Sophia Amoruso: I'm gonna like gaslight the moderator.

Alex Lieberman: Before we finish this thing up, because this is an emergency episode, so we're going to keep it short, let's just quickly talk about, go around the horn of, you have to make money in a new way with Twitter. What's the most creative way you could find money in the business?

Jesse Pujji: Does it have to be creative?

Alex Lieberman: No, it doesn't.

Sophia Amoruso: Cut costs.

Jesse Pujji: I would invest in a Twitter pixel for B2B that would let me measure how many initial leads I'm sending a person and let me run ads against learning who responds and clicks and converts. Basically replicate Facebook's DTC engine for B2B on Twitter and build an ad platform around that. That'd be one of the first things I would do.

Sophia Amoruso: And I think Twitter is such a place for thought leadership. And maybe on Instagram you can have your LinkedIn bio and among many things there, there's some lead gen opportunity for someone to download an info product. But I think Twitter is the place where people are, and you mentioned lead gen earlier, but a place where I can use review and I can have people sign up to my newsletter. That's a few clicks away from someone downloading like a free or paid guide, or something that would get them into my universe in a way that's bigger than just reading my tweets and getting them enrolled as someone who understands me as a thought leader. So I think paying for lead gen, for opt-ins, for anything like that would be really unique and probably really smart.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, I like that. I have two quick ones. One is to sell data to hedge funds. So kind of directionally sell what consumer sentiment looks like, sentiment around businesses looks like, sell to hedge funds directionally. And then the second is like a market research product. So allow businesses to survey audiences to help inform...

Jesse Pujji: I love that.

Alex Lieberman: ...future products in their businesses. It's basically their version of Google surveys.

Jesse Pujji: I love it.

Alex Lieberman: Okay.

Jesse Pujji: There's something, by the way, about all these senior-level decision-makers in B2B and tech on there, more than any other platform, that there's gotta be some...like if you could somehow tell me who would want to opt in to a meeting for Kahani and then I opt in to meet them. And then we both meet and then they charge me $1000, I'd happily pay that.

Sophia Amoruso: I mean, this podcast came, my involvement in this podcast came through a DM. Opportunities like this don't come through DMs on Instagram. They don't come through...

Alex Lieberman: That's how I met Jesse also.

Sophia Amoruso: ...TikTok. It's how I met Sam Par. It's how I've met people who've become really influential in my life. That doesn't happen on Instagram...it's people who are like, hey, I'd love to send you my new socks and T-shirt and whatever. The opportunities I have on Instagram are fine.

Jesse Pujji: I want to see inside of Sophia's DMs.

Sophia Amoruso: They're boring.

Alex Lieberman: A hundred percent a future episode is we're screensharing the phone.

Sophia Amoruso: It's all flames emojis and 100 emojis. That's what it is.

Alex Lieberman: Let's bring this home. Any lessons that entrepreneurs should take from what we're watching right now with Elon taking over the ship?

Sophia Amoruso: Don't try to be that guy, because there's only one of those guys.

Alex Lieberman: It's okay if you're not Elon Musk.

Sophia Amoruso: It's okay.

Jesse Pujji: Yes, it's okay. I mean he does all these things. I think, what I've learned from my little mini, tiny, tiny version of that, where I'm running a bunch of different things is, you gotta focus on one at a time and go really deep and really understand it deeply. That's important. Number two, or actually probably should be number one, is man, you gotta have a lot of good talent around you. So that's where it starts. I think he's already doing that with folks like David...I mean there's people who just...otherwise, no one could pull them out of retirement or whatever, that he can mobilize, and you just need that kind of talent to have any shot at this. Then it's like, tightly manage everything. It's great talent, focus, and then speed, decisiveness.

The other one I'll just throw out, I wrote to you on this day, because it was going through my mind, is people like him don't ask what's correct or incorrect or what's right or wrong in the sense of running a business. They just do what they know and what they want. And I think there's something about entrepreneurs not worrying whether or not "Is this the right course of action?" He's like, this is just what I know. He had to fire, he's like, I can't work with this guy. It wasn't about him being wrong or right. It was just like, I gotta do what I know. And I think there's something to be said about that conviction, worrying less about what's right and wrong and more about what you know and what you want.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, he feels like the classic private equity CEO, but for exciting high-growth companies. And what I mean by that is there's these private equity CEOs who are put into business after business because they have the playbook in a binder, and they have the network of five people they bring into their C-suite. And they're perfect for like 10% growth cash cow businesses. Elon just has that for some of the most exciting businesses in the world.

Jesse Pujji: And the biggest problems. He only cares to spend time on what he decides are really, really important big problems.

Sophia Amoruso: I want to know what's next. What's the next company?

Jesse Pujji: We'll see how this one goes.

Alex Lieberman: I was going to say clearly has to be something about polyamory because he has everything else going on.

Sophia Amoruso: Yeah. I mean that dating app does exist. It's called Field.

Jesse Pujji: How do you know, Sophia?

Alex Lieberman: Yeah.

Sophia Amoruso: I have weird friends…that aren't billionaires.

Alex Lieberman: And with that, thank you for watching and listening to The Crazy Ones. We want to hear from you. What do you think is going to shake out with this whole Elon and Twitter thing? Do you think he's going to end up 4Xing this business into a company that he can sell for a hundred billion dollars in the next five years? Shoot us an email at thecrazyones@morningbrew.com and thanks for watching.