What’s going on in the social media world, particularly with publicly-traded companies, is pretty interesting today, thanks to the news that Elon Musk is gobbling up a huge chunk of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), which has sent the stock vaulting on huge volume.
Impressive as that is, what might surprise you is what an utterly lackluster stock Twitter has been over the course of its lifetime as a financial instrument. Indeed, if some poor soul way back in 2013 had jumped into the IPO and held on until this day, he would have made basically zero. Think how remarkable that is. How many highly-visible high-tech stocks have, over the past eight years, gone absolutely nowhere? Very few. Twitter stands out in that regard.
The side story to this is what’s going on with the Twitter wanna-be’s, most famously, Truth Social. (owned by Digital World Acquisition Corp (NASDAQ:DWAC)). By all accounts, Truth has been an unmitigated flop from both a technology perspective and a business perspective. The ostensible purpose of the product was to create an uncensored Twitter, but it turned out that almost everyone on the platform had pretty much the same opinion, and it was boring. So while the hype around its introduction was tremendous, it has been a total bust, which has only been made worse by the fact that the top guys at the firm have jumped ship.
One (brief) beneficiary of The Truth rollout was a company called Phunware Inc (NASDAQ:PHUN), which as you can plainly see below had its own explosive move higher on tremendous volume. But that came to an quick end in a few days.
As for Twitter itself, I’m not sure what Musk is up to. As a chart, TWTR is certainly no gem of an investment, and frankly, I’d figure Musk kind of has his hands full with Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), SpaceX and The Boring Company. We live in interesting times.