The weird thing about Musk’s plans for Twitter is that he’s focusing on things where his own experience is at a maximum distance from an ordinary user’s experie

The weird thing about Musk’s plans for Twitter is that he’s focusing on things where his own experience is at a maximum distance from an ordinary user’s experience. He thinks reply spam bots are the #1 problem, but that’s because he has millions of followers and a cryptocurrency cult attracted to his name. He wants to add payments, but he’s literally the richest man in the world — he doesn’t even need to pay for anything himself. At Tesla he followed the Steve Jobs model of building something he himself wants to use, then selling the same product to everyone else with minimum variations. This works for a car where the ideal experience is fundamentally the same to everyone (and a phone and a tablet, in Jobs’s case). But the billionaire’s Twitter experience is nothing like mine, which is nothing like that of a 13-year-old girl, and so on. This kind of product development needs empathy, not just a vision of what you’d want to use yourself.