- Musk’s biography reveals that he wanted to establish a blockchain social media platform even before purchasing Twitter.
- Before acquiring the platform, Musk and SBF had a failed negotiation on Bankman-Fried investing in Twitter.
- The biography, written by Walter Isaacson, will be released on September 12.
As the world awaits the release of Elon Musk’s biography, a leaked excerpt shows that the Space X and Tesla CEO has been thinking of creating a social networking platform with payment systems based on blockchain technology, more specifically, Dogecoin.
The eagerly anticipated biography has been written by Walter Isaacson and is expected to be published on September 12. The book will go into great detail about Musk, his life and his accomplishments.
In a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, the media company revealed an exclusive excerpt of the book that stated that the business mogul had long been thinking of establishing a blockchain-based social media platform.
The report also confirmed that Musk has deeper ties with Dogecoin than the crypto community ever knew.
According to Isaacson’s writing, the concept of launching a new social media platform based on the blockchain was presented to Musk during lunch by his brother Kimbal. After becoming intrigued, Musk even joked about including Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency he had been backing, as a method of payment for the site.
This went to show that the billionaire had been involved with the coin on a far deeper level than just a few tweets or memes.
He wrote to Kimbal a few texts after lunch to elaborate on the idea of “a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages like Twitter.”
Musk Acts On His Vision
To begin actualizing his vision, Musk went on to propose to make Twitter private and he made an offer on the same. In the book, Isaacson indicates that Sam Bankman-Fried, the creator of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, expressed his interest in the purchase and offered to invest.
Morgan Stanley, Musk’s banker, pushed him to think about Bankman-Fried, who said he might contribute $5 billion to the project and offer engineering expertise for social media blockchain integration.
Musk thought that a blockchain-based social network would take too long to develop for Twitter’s frequent updates. In response, he told his banker, “Blockchain Twitter isn’t possible, as the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer-to-peer network.”
Bankman-Fried even proposed turning his $100 million worth of Twitter stock into a stake in Twitter once Musk took it private. Musk originally responded in the affirmative, but following interactions with Bankman-Fried were difficult. As a result, Bankman-Fried chose against investing in or converting his Twitter stock because he thought Musk was “nuts”
Musk later spent an astounding $44 billion to buy Twitter. Since then, he has changed the name of the social networking site to X, which is consistent with the initial concept he had in mind.
The Evolution From Twitter to a Blockchain-Powered Platform
Since buying X, Musk has been gradually making changes in the direction of his original plan. Creators are now being compensated for their platform impressions thanks to X’s revenue-sharing scheme, which was launched a few months ago.
The platform has also recently begun working on a blockchain payment feature that will enable users to transact on the app. While it is not known which cryptocurrencies will be used on the platform, the crypto community heavily speculated that Dogecoin will be the first one on board.
Musk has had a very close relationship and immense support for Dogecoin, so much so that he once changed X’s logo to the Dogecoin logo. The Tesla CEO also allowed Dogecoin to be the only crypto that can be used to purchase Tesla cars and products.
With the book slated for release in a week’s time, the crypto community is certainly eager to see how much more Musk has been hiding. The biography is currently available for preorder on Amazon.
