20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Elon Musk’s new CEO will move Twitter toward streaming.
Landing Carlson is the first big clue as to what Musk’s intentions with Twitter are as he rebrands the company into “X” and develops it into what he calls “the everything app” — where users can consume media via streams, photos and videos as it happens. This is Twitter’s true potential power, but users will also be able to shop from hundreds of big-name brands, and do so while watching Tucker Carlson’s monologue.
The olive branch to Don Lemon appears to show that Musk isn’t necessarily driven by political ideology, but rather the void of balance on network news infotainment. Twitter users can watch Tucker Carlson at 8 p.m. and then Don Lemon at 9 p.m. (hypothetically) and won’t even need to change a channel to do so.
This is where [new CEO Linda] Yaccarino’s expertise comes in — handling advertisers and making sure Twitter’s launch into longform, formatted talk show programming goes smoothly. Should Carlson’s launch be successful, it would be an advertising boon to Twitter and change the future of the platform. Twitter’s net viewership would be compared side-by-side to that of Fox News or CNN. Thus far, other social media platforms haven’t even attempted such a thing. The result will be that any media-driven campaigns to name and shame sponsors, as Media Matters, for instance, does with advertisers and Fox News, will be dwarfed by the sheer size of the audience.