Dear The Twitter:
Be bolder.
Sincerely,
@howardlindzon
Happy, greedy, frustrated shareholder.
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Let me keep this high level and simple because the analysts and experts that will drone on endlessly this being earnings week will have as much chance of being right as me.
Twitter is a $36 billion company, which of course is fantastic, but it is massively undervalued. Not in the Warren Buffett way of valuing businesses, but in the networked, software world way.
Why?
Two words…financial markets.
Twitter continues to be the global mood ring.
To monetize the global mood ring best, Twitter should be all in on financial markets. This weekend, their CEO Jack was chatting it up about journalism and discussions being the NUMBER ONE area they need to improve:
“There is an important discussion about journalism that must take place, including about how all of us performed during the 2016 campaign, but Twitter is not where a nuanced or thoughtful discussion can happen.”
This is what we’d like to fix the most.
— jack (@jack) July 21, 2018
As a shareholder I bigly disagree with this focus.
For $5-6 billion they could buy The New York Times at a nice premium and give Fat Nixon a heart attack. Journalism would be fixed (for a brief moment). That would be bold.
Back to financial markets…
I do not see even an inkling of a strategy other than underselling the data to Bloomberg and Goldman et al.
Buying Tweetdeck was genius at the time (I was an angel investor), but if you use Tweetdeck today you are a journalist, a PR person, a prosumer trader or an overpaid _________ with too much time on your hand. I have not used it in years.
Meanwhile, Twitter sits on the best financial data of all time and can’t even seem to make good investments.
I would argue that Twitter has better information that Google and here is what Google does with their data.
Jack is bullish about Bitcoin, but that only seems to matter to him for Square. On Twitter, Bitcoin means crypto scams and yelling.
In the meantime, Google is a Robinhood investor.
It’s not too late to pay $10 billion for Robinhood, tell Bloomberg, Goldman and the rest of Wall Street to enjoy twitter on a 140 second delay and goose Twitter to $100 billion overnight.
Disclosure – Long Robinhood, Google and Twitter.