This article was originally published on Fool.com. All figures quoted in US dollars unless otherwise stated.
It's been a wild seven days in the whirlwind bromance between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR). What started as Musk buying a 9.2% stake in the social media bird and ultimately being named to its board of directors ended abruptly over the weekend. A post from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal late on Sunday revealed Musk has decided not to join the company's boardroom.
To be fair, it would've been a distraction at best. Musk is brilliant, but his unchained antics on the platform itself would've kept Twitter's legal team and his fellow board members suffering through sleepless nights. Over this past weekend alone, Musk was tweeting about how lightly active the social media site's most widely followed users are on Twitter. He also proposed a tongue-in-cheek name change for the company. Musk would've brought the circus to town, but it was going to need a bigger net to catch the falling trapeze artists.
However, lost in his stream of saucy posts, there was a moment of lucidity. Musk offered up a vision of what Twitter Blue -- the premium subscription service that was officially launched 10 months ago -- could and probably should be. No one knows where this flirtation between Musk and Twitter will end. Even Musk doesn't know. However, there's no denying that Twitter Blue could be so much more than what it has become in its first year of open availability.
Blue by you
Twitter Blue doesn't cost much. It's just $2.99 a month. However, it doesn't presently offer much either. Some of the premium subscription's best features include the ability to upload longer videos as well as the ability to preview and undo a tweet if you quickly notice a mistake with a post before it goes live.
It's not all that there is to Twitter Blue. There's access to ad-free articles and exclusive customization features. Twitter Blue also is perpetually improving, so the product in theory will keep getting better over time. However, it's still not much of a needle mover in terms of generating revenue. If investors were hoping for Twitter Blue to be a haven of downside protection if the ad market comes undone they're going to be in for a bout of heartbreak.
In a series of tweets over the weekend that were subsequently scrubbed -- deleted by Musk, one would assume -- the provocative billionaire offered up what Twitter should be. He suggested it should make Twitter ad-free, not just provide access to third-party articles without ads. Musk also proposed that the subscription should eventually come with the blue verified user checkmark, or at least a slightly different version of the authentication badge.
He's not wrong, and since the verified user badge happens to be blue it probably came as a surprise to some when it launched in the springtime of last year that Twitter Blue didn't come with that feature. The ability to fully edit a post, and not just one in preview mode before it goes live is also not much of a feature in a world where the delete function is readily available. Perhaps Musk was making a point by posting his Twitter Blue cookbook on Saturday, only to delete it on Monday.
There is no perfect social media stock. There is room for improvement with every platform, and there will never be one hub that makes everybody happy. However, Musk was right to point out how Twitter Blue has a lot of room to grow in its second year. He was not going to be a good fit in the Twitter boardroom, but if Agrawal is serious about listening to what Musk has to say he may as well start by conceding that Twitter Blue is far from where it needs to be in order to be a substantial premium offering for its users.
This article was originally published on Fool.com. All figures quoted in US dollars unless otherwise stated.
