California Congressman Ted Lieu trolled Elon Musk‘s new Twitter — or X, as of today — CEO Linda Yaccarino as she announced in glowing terms the exhaustive ambitions of the app and company Musk purchased for $44 billion when it was called Twitter.
Announcing the name change from Twitter to X, Musk signaled the nominal shift to his long-held aspiration to create an “everything” app that synthesizes video, payments, messaging and more.
As Yaccarino wrote in breathless prose, “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”
Knocking the post, Lieu said X is just a copycat of something that already exists — and already has a name. Lieu wrote: “What the Twitter CEO described below is called the internet.”
Musk, who just threatened to sue Mark Zuckerberg and Meta for launching Threads, alleging it’s a Twitter knockoff, doesn’t tend to like copycats.
What the Twitter CEO described below is called the internet. https://t.co/2iuUI9lF5y
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 24, 2023
Snark abounds in the reactions, with one observer noting that if Lieu and Musk are both right, then Musk got more of a bargain on Twitter than people give him credit for: the internet is worth far more than $44 billion.
Background: Lieu is something of an exception in Washington when it comes to legislators who possess a real working understanding of technology — especially the consumer-facing technologies that drive huge portions of the American economy.
Congress is full of lawyers, but computer scientists are few and far between. Lieu has the law degree from Georgetown. But he also has a Bachelor of Science in computer science from famed Silicon Valley founder farm system Stanford University, where the Congressman also took a degree in Political Science.
One of the chief criticisms leveled at U.S. government officials trying to rein in the potentially devastating impact of Artificial Intelligence and otherwise stay ahead of the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley and its rapid-release innovations is that the lawmakers too often don’t know much about the technology itself.
To wit, almost any congressional hearing that features a Silicon Valley CEO will reveal cringe moments when an antiquated congress member will fail utterly to grasp the technology they are being asked to consider, highlighted by questions that make 5th graders reply “SMDH.”
A famous example of such an exchange occurred during an April 2018 hearing when then-Senator Orrin Hatch asked Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook: “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Facebook’s advertising revenue that year was $55 billion.
Of course, the late Sen. Hatch and Musk do have something in common. Musk has been considering a version of Hatch’s question ever since he bought Twitter, admitting that he sometimes stays up late at night wondering: “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”
Hatch may have appreciated Musk’s paid blue checkmarks.
