Mike Andes and a co-speaker debate Elon Musk's plan to rebrand Twitter to X, whether it signals a shift toward payments or just a brand reset. They compare how YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter monetize creators through stickers, stars, and subscriptions, and discuss the tension between what users want to pay for and what actually makes money.
Cheers.
Because this is new.
Yeah, I like that.
New lamp. Oh, yeah, dude. Sea food unfilters. Going the next level.
Yeah, it is. One day. One day we'll monetize. Oh, dude. Welcome back. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
Big news. Big news. Elon.
Yeah.
Going all in on Twitter.
Excuse me?
X.
So she's changing it to X. Actually changing the business name to X.
That's what I've been told. That's. What.
Is he just trolling people or is he actually changing?
I think he's actually doing it.
See, the problem is, by the time you release this, it'll have already been determined whether this is a joke or if this is real.
Well, we'll. We can dive right into it.
Okay.
If you. If you want.
Yeah.
First, I do need to give a quick shout out. Chad and Caleb.
Chad and Caleb.
They. They had an intro call with me today.
Oh, yeah.
And they were asking when the next episode's coming out. I said tonight.
I did a live show today, and someone. Someone called it and was like, when's the next episode of C Suite on film?
Let's go. Chad and Caleb, they asked me today. Uh, you know you're down the rabbit.
Hole when you're watching it CC Unfiltered.
Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, you. They. They did say you need to step up. You're not financial advice.
I need to step it up.
Step it up.
Okay. I got good stuff.
They said I'm always prepared. Oh, well, they're like, we can tell you're always prepared, but Mike's just coming up with something.
No, that's usually how this whole show called you out.
Well, yeah.
You have a laptop. I don't.
Yeah, Mike's just Here.
This is.
This is where I give you the ability to, like, free up some brain space.
This is where you earn your 50 of the revenue that we're not making on this. On this show. Exactly.
I'm using your clout. You're using my time to get the content pieces. So Twitter is now X. Here's what this means. This is a CBS News article that was literally posted an hour ago and updated four minutes ago. So this is. This is very fresh.
All right, so is the question, like, is this a good move type thing?
Well, I think that's what we'll get into.
Okay.
That's why I just want to. I haven't even read this article all the way through. That's how fresh it is. So just stop me when you have a thought. This is kind of what I'm Thinking.
Well, like, I think, I think right off the bat, like, whether it's a good or bad idea, it's gonna be completely like in, in, in a month or two, like, everyone will look back and be like, that's what made he's a genius.
Yeah.
Or it'll go back poorly. Like it's what ruined the whole platform. Right. Yeah. But I do think that him switching the name does mean that it's probably pretty bad on the back end. You wouldn't change it if it wasn't bad. Like, if it was all up into the right, you'd be like, hey, let's leave this alone.
And.
Or, or hey, maybe I'm totally wrong on that too. Maybe Elon just like, hey, it's doing great. I'm going to change it to X. Like, it's mine now.
Yeah.
Kind of like what he did to Tesla when he bought out the founders and then like did it all himself.
Yeah, good. What you said on the back end, I think I know what you mean by that, but what do you mean.
By that behind the scenes? Okay, so if behind the scenes he knows he's losing advertisers, the traditional brand of what Twitter stands for has ruined, you know, what it can become. And he's like, I just got to click the reset button. Like, this is almost like a last ditch effort. So that could be it, right?
Could be.
I don't believe that's necessarily true. I think it's actually doing pretty good. And from a user perspective, but from an advertiser's perspective, he might just need a reset and then it cements his legacy and he switches the whole brand of Twitter to X, which is in his mind potentially going to become more of a payments platform. And then they monetize it that way. Yeah. Which makes very, is very interesting to me.
My thought process, I guess, before getting into the article is I think he's going to the latter point, which is a new Meta, a new YouTube Premium, a new Patreon, and he's getting out.
Of the shadow of Twitter.
So he's just, he, he bought an asset that was already in a space he wanted to have a footprint in, and so now he's just adapting the asset to better fit that footprint. Right. That's my thought process.
And just have that user base that already they have their credit. So for example, Twitter blue, so many people getting it, it's just like, okay, now you have all their payment information. So for example, now can you, can you tweet someone money? Like, that'd be Pretty cool. Yeah. So. Or can you do giveaways? Can you give creators money really quickly from a tweet? Yeah, these are the type of things like. And Twitter's getting a cut of all that now. Now forget the advertisers. I don't care. You know, he doesn't have to care about what they think about him now. It's like, hey. And the reason I think that might be his ultimate plan too is the fact that they haven't really worked on the ad platform at all.
Right.
Like the actual backend running ads, they haven't really worked on it at all. They worked on the front end like users. And so it'd just be interesting to see if it's like, I don't even care about the advertising. You can do whatever you want. I'm going to monetize in a completely different way. And like, if he does that dude. And pulls it off.
Oh, dude.
I just cement just the goat in there. I think.
I think that's the way he's going. This is. This is a total tangent. But we're here now. Facebook. So you can do. Facebook creators, you can give stars, right? Do you disable stars?
I recently started disabling them because it's annoying.
I don't think it's an intuitive way of giving.
Real quick. For those who don't know, stars are basically a way to send a content creator money. A donation.
Yep. Yeah. And so I don't think it's a. It's. It's. So like in YouTube, for example, you give stickers, but it's very much attached. Like 499, here's a sticker, right? You can send like Super thanks, like 1099 here, whatever it is. But it's a very much attributed to dollars. And I think when you start trying to like tokenize giving, it can get a little bit funky. Whereas it's like when you. I want to give to a creator, I'm going to give them money. Right. So and having the step of like having to buy stars and then give the stars away versus just it being natively baked and where I can give someone money, it's totally different thought process.
So what's the short answer? Why you don't take stars? Like, you explained it well, but like, why don't you as a person take the stars from people?
It almost feels like I'm asking for money. And when in the. For most creators that have built a business around their content, it's not the money you get from your fans directly from the content. Like YouTube ads isn't like 1% of what we make. Yeah, there's the media side. And so most creators, like, for example, Mr. Beast is giving away all his ad revenue Twitter from one post just like, giving it away.
