Of Musk, Williams said, “I think he’s brilliant. But no one’s brilliant on everything.”
However, Williams seemingly doesn’t necessarily view social media as relevant today as he used to.
Williams said that in social media’s early beginnings, “We thought, oh, the best would be if we got media from our friends,” but now the growing popularity of TikTok is showing him that, to many users, “showing them media from your friends is probably not as good as the media from some super talented person who you’ve never met before.”
“I actually think there’s tons of interesting things now if we think about how do we use the Internet to help people be more social without consuming or creating media, so maybe the future of social media is the separation of social and media,” Williams suggested, seemingly indicating that Twitter and other traditional social media platforms might not have as prominent a place in that hypothetical version of the future.
For Musk to succeed, Williams said the Twitter owner would likely have to be prepared to continue taking on a huge loss.
“I don’t know how comfortable Elon is with losing billions of dollars,” Williams told Bloomberg. “Maybe he is—fine. Maybe he can get to break even and then just play with it. If a hundred million people in the world share the most interesting idea or thought, and the computers could algorithmically give you the most interesting slice of that, that’s a hell of a media service—but I also think, generally, the new thing does not come from the old thing.”
Williams did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. Twitter does not respond to requests for comment.