Before diving into today’s essay on Truth Social and the perils of personality-driven tech, we had some breaking news this morning: Microsoft is officially extending its investment in OpenAI, with Bloomberg reporting that the deal totals $10 billion.
As expected, the investment will give OpenAI more runway to build out its incredibly expensive machine learning and artificial intelligence technology, which Microsoft plans to incorporate throughout its suite of products.
Follow Fortune.com throughout the day for the latest updates on this anticipated development, which our Jessica Mathews and Jeremy Kahn explored in great detail earlier this month.
In the newspaper business, it’s common for the largest dailies to pre-write “advance obituaries” in anticipation of a VIP’s death.
Tech writers might as well start drafting one for Truth Social.
The past week brought two reports suggesting that ex-president Donald Trump’s fledgling social media platform, launched to meager fanfare 11 months ago, is already trending toward the tech grave.
First, NBC News reported on Wednesday that the Trump campaign has formally petitioned Meta to reinstate The Donald’s Facebook account, which the company suspended in the immediate aftermath of the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Meta officials have said they’re planning to announce a reinstatement decision “in the coming weeks.”
Second, Rolling Stone reported Sunday that Trump has told several confidants that he doesn’t want to renew his exclusivity agreement with Truth Social, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The agreement stipulates that Trump is “generally obligated to make any social media post on TruthSocial and may not make the same post on another social media site for 6 hours.”
Both news organizations also said Trump is brainstorming ideas for his imminent return to Twitter, a platform on which Truth Social is modeled, following his reinstatement late last year by new owner Elon Musk. (Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes has refuted claims about the former president pining for Twitter.)
Shares of Digital World Acquisition Company, the special-purpose acquisition company that plans to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, fell 2% in midday trading Monday. They’re now down 85% from a 52-week high set in March 2022.
Trump’s wandering eye signals an all-but-assured end of Truth Social, which never built on its promise of a GOP gathering space centered around Trump’s outsized persona. Despite a modest launch in February 2022, Truth Social currently ranks as the 102nd-most downloaded free social media app in the App Store, sandwiched between something called Purp and the dating app Cougar (which is exactly what it sounds like).
For Trump, Truth Social always seemed like something of a half-hearted lark aimed at taking revenge on tech executives who blocked, suspended, and otherwise ostracized him. He was bewilderingly absent from Truth Social for its first two months of existence, a rare case of the showman skipping out on the circus. Moreover, he never weaponized the platform as a tool in the right’s war on Big Tech, as I argued he might last year.
But the Truth Social flop also serves as an occasional reminder that personality simply can’t trump technology. While we often lionize our most famous moguls, their accomplishments in tech are rarely built around a cult of character.
Steve Jobs became renowned for his black turtlenecks and greatest-show-in-tech product reveals, but the company’s success under lower-key Tim Cook underlines that the iPhones and computers were always the star of the show. Elon Musk has taken Trump’s mantle as America’s most famous demigod/villain, depending on your political persuasion and tolerance for ego, yet the futures of Tesla and Twitter will be defined by innovation in their respective sectors.
The biggest recent developments in the industry, by contrast, trace back to advances in new technology. TikTok became a global phenomenon because of its video-centric platform and scary-good algorithm. Generative A.I. emerged from enormous investments in machine learning. Augmented and virtual reality required billions of dollars in R&D—and they’re still years away from going mainstream.
Meanwhile, the money and minds behind Truth Social never offered anything more than a lame Twitter knockoff branded with the Trump name. The 45th president remains a modern marvel of political prowess (albeit a diminishing one), but the traits that elevated him to the White House just don’t sell the same in Silicon Valley.
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Jacob Carpenter
