Data Is The New Oil...Revisiting The Subject In a Closed Twitter and ChatGPT World...And Thank-You Elon?

Good morning...

Way back in 2014, Wired wrote 'Data Is The New Oil of the Digital Economy'

I immediately went back to watch the fantastic 'There Will Be Blood' (2007) to brush up on my gangster skills and practice 'I drink from your milkshake' as I waited for my phone to ring offering me billions for Stocktwits unique dataset.

As it turns out, 'Data is the new oil' is a teency weency bit of a generalization.

Unique datasets are valuable, BUT it depends on many factors.

Now that AI and ChatGPT have exploded onto the scene, the 'data is the new oil' conversation has restarted.

My friend Ted Merz (here in a great Panic podcast we did), who at Bloomberg helped put the Twitter data deal together for Bloomberg just wrote this excellent piece about the dataset within Docsend (a unit of DropBox)

Recently, Elon Musk announced he is closing down the Twitter API's. Like a pitcher that hits a batter, only Elon knows why he is doing this, but I would speculate it is all about the money - the oil money.

When Elon acquired Twitter, Fred Wilson, Twitter's early investor, wrote 'some thoughts on Twitter':

Fred's partner Albert Wenger tweeted this at the time:

So here we are in 2023 months after Elon acquired Twitter and Elon Musk is doing the opposite. Fred has quit Twitter but Albert is still a user. Elon is always controversial, BUT...

Elon is no dummy.

My best guess is that Elon sees Twitter as this unique dataset and since he owns it for himself as a private company might as well set up the best hedge fund in the world. He will never admit that. Actually, it is Elon and he would probably admit to throwing at a batter so he will surely one day tweet about all the money he is making from trading against tweets.

Right now, the best two 'hedge funds' in the world are Citadel and Google. Citadel gets to make markets in stocks because of the unique order flow from brokers like Schwab, etrade and Robinhood. Those fractions of pennies start adding up pretty quickly. There is a lot of arguing about why 'payment for order flow' is allowed.

When you type a search into Google, they get paid for matching companies with your search requests. A different type of payment for order flow.

I think it is not a stretch to assume that in 2023 we are much closer to the idea and world that Wired wrote about in 2014 that 'Data is the new digital oil'.

As the co-founder of Stocktwits I have always been told our data is valuable so now that Twitter data is locked down, I guess I owe Elon Musk a thank-you?

Have a great day.