> "It is obvious. It's also obvious that Elon could draw an initial set of users that was more than big enough to have sufficient network effects on day 1."
This would be "obvious" about Trump, too, no?
Perhaps your claim is that Musk would have a better chance of making something that scales and can accept all those users from day 1, but then that's also a much more expensive bet for Musk to make with higher up-front pre-launch cost.
Musk wouldn’t do such a blunder launching it. Truth Social with a sizeable war chest, took Mastadon (while [still] lying about it) with many months if not over a year to get it ready.
Being able to launch a product with more than enough resources is almost intertwined with drawing in users. Truth Social never had the bare minimum expectations. Something that is not given to most people since most aren’t abnormally focused on grifting and so on for such a big venture.
Another critical failure of Truth: Trump wasn't posting on it. Trump can't carry a platform he himself couldn't bother to use. Truth might've survived launch on that core difference alone, and an Elon-backed service might work if Elon himself actually uses it.
That is wildly baffling. Not only Trump not using it, but does that mean the dozens upon dozens of popular figures around him who his fans also like, are mostly not using it either?
The SPAC stock is still holding strong snd it self making no sense day to day. It went up 7%+ on news Fox joined two weeks ago. The next day when this was found to be false. It didn’t even drop 1-2%.
Truth will fail no doubt. However all the SPAC, other investing and political insiders and the Trump family themselves still have a realistic shot of cashing out pretty well. Nothing close to if it was competently rolled out, but tens of millions to hundreds of millions going to many diff insiders is still a ton. Trump’s cash out should still be huge and would probably give him his largest cash stock pile ever (before it goes to pay debts off)
Indeed, this will fall into the long history of Trump branded failures. The thing is it would be so difficult for him to avoid. The only "thing that doesn't scale" he'd have to do is talk on it for a while. How many of his followers would flock there if there was a non-zero chance to actually talk to him.
This would be "obvious" about Trump, too, no?
Perhaps your claim is that Musk would have a better chance of making something that scales and can accept all those users from day 1, but then that's also a much more expensive bet for Musk to make with higher up-front pre-launch cost.