Would Elon Buy Shift4 to Get Jared Isaacman as CEO for Twitter ? $TWTR $TSLA $FOUR

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Alexandra Merz proposed that Elon Musk is raising more cash to buy Shift4 to accelerate the move of Twitter into payments processing.

Jared Isaacman is the founder and CEO of the payment processing firm Shift4 Payments ($FOUR). He started the firm in 1999, at age 16, in his parents’ basement in Far Hills, New Jersey and took it public in June 2020. Today he owns 38% of the stock.

Jared has already flown in a SpaceX Falcon 9 to orbit and will fly in the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship.

Alexandra’s idea that Shift4 is used to accelerate Twitter into payments is plausible.

I think Jared Isaacman would be the perfect CEO-COO for Shift4.

Shift4 handles mainly payments for a third of America’s restaurants and hotels. But not only. The Starlink subscription is processed by Shift4 Payments.

Gwynn Shotwell is the COO of SpaceX.

Elon is transforming from short-form text discussion into Wechat for the world.

This move would be somewhat like Apple buying Next Computer to get Steve Jobs to return as CEO.

Tencent owns Wechat at is has all of the functions below. Tencent has more value because they make most of their money from fees from handling microtransactions and payments. This is a higher-quality revenue stream than ads.

Twitter transformed into X would be Wechat for the rest of the world. North Americans and Europeans using X for Wechat like services would have higher ARPU (average revenue per user).

37 thoughts on “Would Elon Buy Shift4 to Get Jared Isaacman as CEO for Twitter ? $TWTR $TSLA $FOUR”

  2. Reviewing what Musk has had to say, I find his proposal to make Twitter a full service provider of financial services very promising. I used to use PayPal years ago, until they up and decided that it was their money, not mine, and started dictating what I could spend my own money on. That was when I bailed on them. (This happened post-Musk.)

    If Musk establishes early on a policy that they will complete ALL legal transactions, without regard to whether they approve of the product or service involved, regardless of what they think personally about the sender or recipient of the money, his plans for Twitter sound very attractive.

    If he’s going down the road of dictating what you can spend your own money on, that would be an utter deal breaker for me, even if I don’t disagree with his evaluations. It would betray a very dangerous conception of the relationship between a service provider and its customers.

    It would be no different than if Tesla started vetoing destinations, really. Which as a technical matter they absolutely could do, but I think they recognize how abusive it would be. He needs to understand the principle is no different with payment processing.

  4. but who’s buying overvalued (what might be just an anticipation for years to come high market share, but slow down in sales requirements from saturated market demand also) stock?
    … investment money looking for better value than current interest rates, growth goods, other underrated stock or risky (on yield) technologies or customers/staff?

  5. He’s using acquisitions to dump overvalued Tesla shares. You’ll find out on Nov 14 aftermarket how many he’s been offloading.

  6. Twitter is finished. The mass migration will be very hard to stop. The Musk stab on mind control is going to be his first major fiasco, one in a more upcoming ones indicating that he has gone array with arrogance and control mindset after some initial succeses

    From Yahoo news today:
    “Over the course of the next 48 hours, I saw countless announcements on my Twitter feed from people either leaving the platform or making preparations to leave. The hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter, #TwitterMigration and #Mastodon were trending. The decentralized, open source social network Mastodon gained over 100,000 users in just a few days, according to a user counting bot.

    As an information scientist who studies online communities, this felt like the beginning of something I’ve seen before. Social media platforms tend not to last forever. Depending on your age and online habits, there’s probably some platform that you miss, even if it still exists in some form. Think of MySpace, LiveJournal, Google+ and Vine.”

    • Agreed.
      A strange thing: mostly about the AD companies leaving. Who knew that they were that important in income source and content sensitivity? Where will they go – I hear TV, radio, and newspapers are in decline (giggle)… billboards? my spam folders have increased 10x in the last few months? Is anyone getting netfilx ADs tier or any other declining streaming service? Everyone I know has an advanced adBlocker/ VPN/ private browser for those who browse with OS rather than phone/ tablet for websites. Can Reddit be bought – they seem impervious to take-downs yet retain a rich stew of vitriole, hatred, diverse subjects, high audience numbers, and relevant subject boards – a jungle amongst civilized banter. I for one feel that Musk should weather the storm, accept bots and impersonators, accept all and every subjetc – and as a future goliath, create ‘safe’ spaces for ADverts. Tis but strange times.

      • Reddit is definitely an echo chamber. People like me, and likely Brett Bellmore are banned quickly without warning. Haven’t been on the platform in months – crept around long enough after the ban to see a thread started in my honor asking what happened to scaryjello.

    • Twitter will be profitable by the 3rd year of Musk’s ownership.

      Politically blinded people, both on the left and right, have been predicting Tesla or SpaceX would fail for years.

      It will take a while, but Musk has proven his haters wrong time and time again.

      Flee to some other platform and see how (in)active your account is, or how terrible the newsfeed is. Trumpers learned that the hard way. Leftiies will learn the same lesson. Mastadon, BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Rumble, and Truth Social all stink. Wastelands with a paucity of diversity.

      • Well if staff keep leaving like at present the wage bill will be a fraction of the current amount. So yeah, it might become profitable.

        • Staff can be replaced. And it’s not like there will be a drought of job applicants on the current contracting economy.

          Musk had to do what he had to do, to remove all the rests of institutional inertia and activists with a grudge from their ranks.

          There are few things worse than disloyal employees, entitled and believing they are in a holy quest, with a hand on the most critical buttons running your company.

    • All that’s going on is that the left are freaking over the idea that one of the major social media platforms might soon not be censored the way they like. (They’ve become enormously dependent on that ability to censor the opposition.) So in true “rule or ruin” fashion, they’re trying to bring Twitter down, by creating a public belief that it’s coming down, in the hope people will flee a sinking ship.

      It might work, because the rest of their online memeplex will be working overtime to reinforce the party line. But it might not, because a fair number of people who’d avoided Twitter are now signing up.

      • not (only) about left or right (community oriented or hierarchic&rules oriented), its about minimum agreement on standards of respect and empathy within humanitarian educated societies, also (?)

        • Yes, the left have long been claiming that agreeing with them about everything is just common decency. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked if Merriam-Webster altered their online dictionary to make that the ‘official’ definition of decency. They’ve been doing that sort of thing lately.

          But I’m sure on some level you’re aware of what a tendentiously self-serving claim that is.

            • Emotional harm is an unusable standard for censorship of speech. For example if I say that your post hurt my feelings should it be censored? If not, why? How will you validate emotional harm? How will you compare the harm of restricting speech versus the harm of allowing speech? Is a person emotionally harmed when they are silenced?

              • If it’s about global communication different legal standards depending on culture, customs/conventions and partly religion are interacting on one platform with directly connecting people. If it’s about e.g. offense/defamation there might be a range from being received from seen funny to maybe feeling attacked (depending on cultural influences, education (with at least being able handling mobiles/computers), level of tolerance, empathy, habits). Not yet seen configuration possibilities for country related customs adjustment (and probably that’s even better for adjusting towards each on global communication)?
                If one explains some expression or statement in dialogue/monologue was illegal and should/must not be used, that strongly depends on each point of view.

                “How will you validate emotional harm? How will you compare the harm of restricting speech versus the harm of allowing speech? Is a person emotionally harmed when they are silenced?”
                Could silence be more harm than a ‘low’ level of disagreement or feeling emotional uncomfortable?
                The possible impartial mean for measuring would be common law formed on centuries of collective customs (easier for cosmopolitans, global citizens, more difficult from (mentally) isolated societies) (?)
                Do Isaacman and Musk represent such polarity on customs (or on what items not that diverse) being example for how to manage that? Management is an initiator for a (big) change in the distribution of social classes of users?

      • Hi Brett.
        What you claim is simply not true. The recent events from the midterm election and the red wave that did not materialize should suggest you to check better sources of information. The radical right-wing media depict a reality that does not exist.
        The radical right (not all the right) screams about freedom of speech, but what it really wants is no accountability for hate speech and inciting violence.
        And as the midterm clearly showed the majority of people in US does not like the message of the radical right.
        Advertisers follow the biggest available markets.
        The best platform for advertisers are platforms where there is little polarization as they can reach the vast majority of right-leaning and left-leaning customers.
        Furthermore the vast majority of people and advertisers consider acceptable messages that expand the rights of other people (because they might help expand the customers base) rather than messages restricting the rights of others so:
        -Messages that do promote better treatment for minorities or equal opportunities are more accepted than messages that aim to restrict the rights of minorities.
        -Messages that promote tolerance are more marketable than messages about oppression
        -Messages of respect and recognition of common rules are more marketable than conspiracies about cheating.

        It does not really matter if a given advertiser has certain political beliefs or not, their company will be better off reaching the biggest market.
        For example, the political views of Mike Lindell were irrelevant to his business until HE decided to make them relevant. And most people did not like his ideas.
        As in many other cases where radical right-wing media complain about censorship of a given message that is absurd because the backlash occurred only when the general public became aware of the message and distanced themselves from it. People did not like Mike Lindell message and stopped buying his pillows. Censorship is being prevented from publishing a book, if nobody likes it and the book does not sell, it is not censorship. It is just a bad book, a bad message, or both.
        Regards.

        • “The radical right (not all the right) screams about freedom of speech, but what it really wants is no accountability for hate speech and inciting violence.”

          Aside from the notion that everything the left disagrees with is “hate speech”, you seem to have forgotten ‘disinformation’, casually defined as “Anything the censors think would lead to Wrongthink.”

          I used to be part of a private group on FB, just some old friends who’d met online, and kept in touch through multiple platforms. Most of us were engineers, and libertarian/conservative, what you’d label “radical right”, though not all of us by any means. We just like discussing the issues of the day, technological developments, that sort of thing.

          After a while we started getting moderation notices from FB, threats to lock down the group if we didn’t stop violating the TOS. They never told us what the supposed violations were. Even though we always asked, it was need to know information, and we didn’t need to know. I suppose we were supposed to guess, and self-censor on that basis.

          None of it was particularly hateful, I think, (Though people who confuse ideological disagreement with hate might disagree.) and certainly we weren’t inciting violence. And we COULDN’T have been offending anyone, it was a private group, nobody saw our posts except for invited members and FB’s designated volunteer busybodies.

          But, still, they drove us from FB to MeWe, because they hated the idea we could speak freely to each other.

          It’s funny: Just about the time the Catholic church gave up on the notion that “Error has no rights”, the left picked it up and adopted it with a vengence.

          • Similarly, I know a small farmer’s group on FB, I’m a member. You know what gets them into trouble absurdly often? Not hate. (They hate maybe coyotes, that’s about it.) Not disinformation. Discussing buying and selling animals.

            Seems FB gave some PETA types moderation privileges, and if you discuss animals as property you get shut down.

            Maybe you think selling a rooster is hate speech?

            • The problem is that any centralized control system can be captured. Having a “don’t be evil” founder always fails and more so with someone like Musk who has other ventures like Tesla Shanghai, Tesla USA and SpaceX that can be threatened by the govt.

              Getting excited about a billionaire savior is a fool’s errand.

              • I’d see their track of behavior. Musk, as repellent as he may be for some people, is not into making others shut up as a general police.

                He has been kind of a jerk with some people (e.g. the Thai scuba diver), but that’s in case by case basis.

            • Hi Brett, thank you for your reply.
              I do not think that everything the left disagrees with is hate speech. I would consider myself left-leaning and disagree with many things, both on the right side and the left side of the spectrum and not everything is hate speech.
              If I might add, I do not like, I do not agree with, and I do not support any kind of violent rhetoric not from the right nor from the left. In particular, I admit that I openly despise PETA and its rhetoric.
              As I think we discussed already in the comments to another post, the first amendment protects the citizen’s freedom of speech from the government, but it does not work and, in my modest opinion, it should not work between companies and private citizens. You can build a company and legally put in your contractual clauses that the word “horse” (or anything you like) should never be used in any of your business dealings and that its use is a breach of the contractual obligations. It is your right to do so, and nobody should force you to do otherwise. Your choice might impact your business if you sell saddles or horseshoes, though.
              If facebook moderation does not satisfy you, you have all the right to look for an alternative, but the problem is that many of those that complain about the censorship, simply want their platform to be the mainstream one (I am not saying it is your case). I am pretty sure out there there is a Stalin fanclub about that complains that they are ostracized too and do not get enough money from their advertisers, but it is on them and their choice of very niche and highly questionable content.

              Regarding the breaching of TOS (or alleged breaching), I completely agree that it sucks and social media companies should be legally forced to publish TOS that fit 1-3 pages maximum, are plainly written as bullet points in plain English and alledged breaches of the TOS should be decided by a verifiable score of published open metrics.

            • Your example on a farmers group is still attackable, but if ‘busybodies’ don’t like 4-8+12=8 for being wrong facts, Russian influencing or hate-speech, because a Twitter’ers account naming was ‘Platoon’, things are getting absurd/grotesque.

              Lately, me having encoding difficulties with system update and inserted a ‘back2[будущее]’ for posting comments, guess what happened to this comment 🙂

            • I believe it. The channel is owned by people wholly unsympathetic to your needs and plights, and they make it clear you are not welcome and just shut you up. That’s the power rot a lot of people have seen on the supposedly free and open social networks.

              And a lot of the nearly instinctive repugnance some people have for the pious left, comes precisely from this “better than thou” attitude they smear wherever they go. Teaching moral lessons and enlightening those not like them, who (un)surprisingly, tend to be rural or small city dwellers not into the latest bleeding hearted moral fads.

        • I think these anti-speech fascists posting above demonstrate why Twitter is an excellent *financial* opportunity for Musk to provide a forum for alternative viewpoints, albeit under his control — a sort of Fox News for social media. That’s a natural outcome of Apple, Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter all going uniformly woke fascist.

          While Foxnews.social isn’t exactly what I want, it’s certainly better than the status quo. Musk will easily trim costs by eliminating the jobs program for fascist dimwits and if it drives the woke church ladies in the user community off to decentralized platforms, so much the better! For every one of those, he’ll pull 5 disaffected freedom-loving, heritage Americans off of other platforms.

          • Hi Vetsel,
            Any platform with a strong political orientation will have fewer customers than a platform that has a weaker political orientation. So, no, a Twitter platform with a strong/stronger political orientation will be at best a niche business opportunity. Buying a global platform (and paying for it as such) and transforming it into a small platform (regardless of the political orientation) is not a good business strategy.

        • “And as the midterm clearly showed the majority of people in US does not like the message of the radical right.”

          R’s got more votes than D’s.

          • Hi combinatorics, in the statement that you quoted I specifically mentioned the radical right. And indeed the vast majority of the nation refused the message of the radical right. The most extreme candidates managed to win only in very safe seats. In many races, the presence of extreme candidates made such seats less safe for the GOP (for example Lauren Boebert’s seat was supposed to be very safe but that race is very close). When running in competitive districts, the MAGA candidates performed poorly compared to old-school Republicans.
            So yes, even though republicans won the popular vote, the radical rightwing message was rejected by the vast majority of the people, and that cost the GOP the senate. The GOP might still win the house , but it still was a very poor performance dragged down by the maga candidates.
            Regards.

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