I met a gentleman in southern Arizona this week who owns a selection of local businesses of varying quality, and a huge house with a pool. He's dated half the Suns cheerleading team as a primary but not unfulfilled goal. There are no walkable roads and every billboard is a political advertisement. But in a global market you need noise and scale and beating the hell outta the other guy in the polls. You need more than Arizona voters.
The purpose of marketing on X (the everything app) has nothing to do with reaching customers. It's about selling shares at high prices to venture capitalists and retail investors. Botted launch posts. Alexandr wang tweeting memes. Down 40% YTD? Mandatory David Senra interview. Zuckerberg hired a Balyasny PM for investor relations. SemiAnalysis has a drake video.
Michael Saylor maximalizes this. Print shares for the indices, retail call buyers, convertible bond arbitrage desks, and whoever else'll buy em. Funnel cash into a hard asset. Bending spoons announced Airtable layoffs on X today as ragebait. Millions of impressions converting “investors” at 1.5% toward checking BSP on tradingview.
This new marketplace of ideas ensures the death of legacy brands. Nike, Starbucks, Lululemon. Down only. Nobody has a persistent brand identity or favorites. They don’t remember Jordan playing. They don’t remember the basketball game from 3 days ago. You’re competing with a marketplace of 800 micro brands fighting in the trenches of Meta ads. One just discovered Kendall Jenner’s third best friend from high school’s new Youtube channel via Grokbot and sent her a free pair of shoes.
A new uncanny valley: this X account
“There’s no more individual anymore, it’s just the hive” - Sam Hyde