Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey discusses their ideas for a Web3 social media platform

Elon Musk wrote to former Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey that ‘a social media company is needed that is based on a blockchain and includes payments’ in a text days before he was offered to acquire Twitter. 

A series of text messages between Musk and Dorsey shines a new light on Musk’s controversial acquisition of Twitter and why the deal fell through. The texts were also exchanged between FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and investor-podcaster Jason Calcanis, television personality Gayle King and podcaster Joe Rogan. 

The 40 page long text messages were exchanged between January and June 2022 and were made public by Internal Tech Emails and New York Times reporter Kate Conger.
Musk raised censorship and the failure of Twitter to protect free speech. The text messages revealed Musk’s vision on what Twitter should ideally look like as a Web3 platform. 

‘I have an idea for a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short messages/links like [T]witter. You have to pay a tiny amount to register your message on the chain, which will cut out the vast majority of spam and bots. There is no throat to choke, so free speech is guaranteed,’ Musk said in a text message to his entrepreneur brother Kimbal Musk.

In a separate conversation with Dorsey, Dorsey suggested that the Web3 social media platform should be based on an ‘open-source protocol, funded by a foundation’ without centralized control. 

‘A bit like what Signal has done,' Dorsey continued. ‘It can't have an advertising model." As Dorsey explained, having an advertising model gives a surface area that government and advertisers will try to influence and control. ‘If it has a centralized entity behind, it will be attacked,’ he said.

‘I think it's worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that's decentralized,’ Musk said in response.

Photo: Fox Business