Elon closes Twitter deal, $META uncertainty, Zuck's historic bet, big tech decline & more

The episode opens with the hosts teasing one of their number about a week away from the show. According to the teasing, that week was spent on several guest appearances elsewhere, including a segment on Ukraine with Dave Rubin and an earlier interview with Megyn Kelly. When asked whether Kelly had called him a prick, he answers yes and jokes that she only needed 45 minutes to reach that view, where others take three or four days.

The conversation turns to online reaction. One host says the negative YouTube comments have been the worst since a co-host was attacked over his pro-Ukraine stance, and that he is now being piled on both for asking a question and for not showing up. Another host dismisses the comments as the work of about a hundred nitwits, set against what he says is an audience of three to five million people a week, and suggests turning comments off. His claim is that only ratings matter and that the previous week's show was among the best-rated they have done, second only to the episode with Elon. These audience figures are the host's own and are not verified in the source.

A third host offers a band analogy: the group has a lot of infighting, but it works, and fans do not take well to substitutes. When someone sits in for a sick band member, the argument goes, people still want their own guitar player back. The speaker is glad the latecomer arrived, though 22 minutes late.

The hosts welcome Friedberg and start the show, then keep the band joke going by assigning roles. Ringo is called an underrated drummer, one host is told he is more like the drummer, and he claims instead to be the dreamer or maybe the bass player, then John Lennon, while George Harrison is also called underrated. It is light filler with no analytical content.

One host asks whether the others have heard Paul McCartney's ukulele-only version of Blackbird and calls it one of the best records he has heard. Lyric fragments from the song are sung or read out before another host asks Sacks whether he was at a building on Market Street the previous day, which sets up the next topic.

The Market Street question is answered with jokes about a no-fly zone and an abandoned homeless shelter. One speaker says many people they know will help make Market Street better, and another jokes about tofu salads and meditation. One of them claims that about 8,000 square feet of the building consists of meditation rooms that have not been used in five years. That detail is his assertion and is not checked against anything in the source.

A speaker then argues that Parag Agrawal deserves credit for creating shareholder value, pointing to a price of $54.20 a share. He says the hosts predicted the outcome and calls it huge in the current market. He imagines the barista's face as company builders walk in and the oat milk is warmed up, and another voice quips that the oat milk has left the building. The tone is mocking and the claims are the speakers' own.

Someone says they can finally discuss the fact that Elon has closed the deal, and two hosts explain that they could not talk about it earlier for legal reasons. The same speaker jokes that the former management deserves a statue in front of the Twitter building on Market Street and names Agrawal best tech CEO of the year. Another host asks whether the theory is that poor handling of censorship pushed Elon to buy the company.

The answer is that the theory is simpler. In this speaker's account, the company had strong representation and a bulletproof deal, contract law still matters in the United States, and Elon decided to own the company and probably double or triple his money. The speaker adds that the board had the wherewithal to fight instead of being intimidated into capitulating, and that, whether or not they were right or wrong otherwise, they got shareholders paid at a premium while the market was down 20% to 40% and Big Tech was down 50%, with some names down 80%. These figures are the speaker's own.

Another speaker adds history: the stock traded at $69 in 2013 and was sold at 54, so the company has been sideways in market cap for a decade. He expects Elon to turn it around quickly, make it massively profitable and clean up the bot problem, reasoning that someone who can land two rockets at a time and build self-driving cars can figure this out. This is a prediction, not an established result.

The hosts say Elon is excited and that Twitter has tremendous potential, since it has been sideways largely because it has done little in ten years. One speaker frames the purchase as buying about a quarter of a billion monthly users for $44,000,000,000, which he expects to look reasonably cheap if bigger ideas are layered in, and he thinks the value of those users could double or triple fairly fast.

Another host shares an analyst's figure that Twitter was bought at $172 per monthly active user versus $81 at Meta today. A speaker objects that this is cherry-picking and a different question, because Meta has its own deep and dangerous problem that explains its low valuation per user. He adds that a few years ago the same analysis would have shown Meta's per-user value so high that people would have asked why Twitter was not doing more. The $172 and $81 numbers come from an analyst cited by a host and are not verified here.

On product changes, one speaker says that making everything verified through a path to verification, plus payments, both of which Elon has discussed publicly, could make Twitter delightful. A second speaker sharpens it into two classes of users: verified real-world identities, who would get full distribution, and anonymous accounts, who would have to pay to amplify. He argues that this one change would cut through the nonsense and make spending visible. A third speaker says it would also be a revenue stream, since many people might pay five or ten dollars a month to be verified. These are proposals and predictions, not outcomes.

One speaker agrees and says people cannot use Twitter as a coping mechanism. He accepts that life is hard and may not match expectations, and that envy exists, but argues that spewing hate does not solve anything. When another host asks if he means the pile-ons, he says there are also simply a lot of people who are mean.

His example is a woman on TikTok, married for 13 years with two children, whose video about who is in charge, her or her husband, went viral. Looking at her other videos, he found one where she spoke publicly about complicated health issues, including PCOS and how it affects losing weight, and posted before-and-after pictures, which he says takes courage. The comments then turned on her, which prompts him to ask what is wrong with these broken people. The account is his own retelling and the details are not verified.

Finishing the TikTok example, the speaker says social media channels are not coping mechanisms and were never meant to be. His view is that if people who want to be hostile must go to 4chan, 8chan, Reddit or similar places, it is better to create such honeypots of hatred than to let the abuse spread everywhere, because otherwise the platforms become unusable for everyone else.

A host then turns to Sacks, reminding him that he was PayPal's COO alongside Elon, and teasing that he has been piled on lately. The host asks which idea is bigger for shareholder value: payments, turning Twitter into something like PayPal, with a nod to x.com as the name of Elon's original payments company, or verification. The reply is that payments is an entire road map with many services layered on top, and that both are compelling.