Before I get started…I was riding in the hills of Paradise Valley yesterday and ran into Wile E. Coyote and his Mrs.:

Amazing how they camouflage so well in the desert (lower left). Also why you should not leave your dogs out alone in many areas of Phoenix and Scottsdale.

Onwards…

Way back in 2009, I wanted Amazon to pay $2 billion for Twitter:

Along comes Twitter, which by the way was built by nerds, but built for READERS, WRITERS and BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS.

When Jeff Bezos, who is an investor in Twitter, buys Twitter to own the NOW web and Search and combine the best one to many communication tool with the best retailer in the world, please don’t be shocked. The nerds will scoff at the price – north of $2 billion, but Bezos will chuckle in their faces as he always does. He knows what its like to make an investment in the future and live with the short-term shareholder revolts that come along with it.

Amazon was only a $40 billion company at the time and Jeff Bezos was already an investor in Twitter.

In 2011, I wanted the same thing. Twitter was not public and I had given it the ticker symbol $TWIT:

In March 2009, Amazon was a $40 billion company, now $87 billion or so. For 15 percent, the interest graph seems cheap to me. It would have been cheaper in 2009. Maybe Jeff Bezos, an investor in Twitter can get them to do it for $9 or $10 billion.

I doubt Twitter will ever have thousands of employees so at this time it would be cool to see the capital unleashed on the new young centimillionaires and get the web employment multiplier going even faster. I don’t see it being unlocked in other sectors of our economy.

Let’s do it Jeffy!

Here we are in 2020 and it still makes sense for Amazon to buy Twitter. Even if Jeff paid $50 billion for Twitter it would be less than five percent of Amazon, or just 400 Los Angeles homes.

Buying Twitter today would be more about e-commerce than the social graph.

Let me explain.

I only use Twitter in the ‘see latest tweets‘ mode. When I open Twitter I do not want news which is what their ‘home‘ version gives you. I want the random links and discussions from the people I follow. It is like the ‘Russian Roulette‘ of context.

Yesterday I opened Twitter and the first tweet I read was this one:

So I did.

In two clicks (Shopify and Apple Pay) I had my book:

and…

As Shopify and Apple Pay explode, Amazon needs to shake things up.

For kicks Bezos would also get to ban Fat Nixon from Twitter and crush sales of Tylenol and Advil.

Disclosure – Long Amazon, Apple and Shopify …I win either way!