Ahead of the highly controversial trial between Tesla CEO Elon Musk versus Twitter, a series of documents were included in the process of “discovery”.
During discovery, a series of Elon Musk text messages were included in the lawsuit – including direct messages between Musk and major Twitter executives like as founder Jack Dorsey, board chair Bret Taylor, and current CEO Parag Agrawal – as well as other informal conversations with investor Jason Calacanis and even popular podcaster Joe Rogan.
In one of these messages, a particular one was very relevant for Dogecoin enthusiasts. Apparently, Musk was looking to charge 0.01 DOGE per tweet.
“I have an idea for a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages/links like Twitter.” Elon Musk wrote. “You have to pay a tiny amount to register your message on the chain, which will cut out the vast majority of spam and bots. There is no throat to choke, so free speech is guaranteed.”
If Musk’s idea ever came true, it is safe to assume that Twitter would be profiting a lot from its user’s interactions.
On average – 6,000 tweets are sent per second, amounting to over 350,000 tweets sent each minute, 500 million tweets per day, and approximately 200 billion tweets per year.
In a hypothetical world where Twitter adopted the Dogecoin payment per-Tweet system, and the total number of daily Tweets was cut by a third due to most users not wanting to pay for every tweet — Twitter would still be making US$103,333 in Dogecoin per day (according to Dogecoin’s current price value).
“My Plan B is a blockchain-based version of Twitter, where the ‘tweets’ are embedded in the transaction of comments,” Musk wrote to Steve Davis, the president of The Boring Company. “So you’d have to pay maybe 0.1 Doge per comment or repost of that comment.”
However, it is safe to assume that the general Twitter user base would strongly oppose the idea of paying per tweet.
Musk eventually determined that a blockchain-based Twitter would be impossible to implement at this time.