What’s going on in the social media world, particularly with publicly-traded companies, is pretty interesting today, thanks to the news that Elon is gobbling up a huge chunk of Twitter (TWTR) which has sent the stock vaulting on huge volume.

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Impressive as that is, what might surprise you is what an utterly lackluster stock Twitter has been over the course of its lifetime as a financial instrument. Indeed, if some poor soul way back in 2013 (which was, oh, about fifty thousand years ago) had jumped into the IPO and held on until this day, he would have made basically ZERO. Think how remarkable that is. How many highly-visible high-tech stocks have, over the past eight years, gone absolutely nowhere? Very few. Twitter stands out in that regard.

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The side story to this is what’s going on with the Twitter wanna-be’s, most famously, Truth Social. By all accounts, Truth has been an unmitigated flop from both a technology perspective and a business perspective. The ostensible purpose of the product was to create an uncensored Twitter, but it turned out that almost everyone on the platform had pretty much the same opinion, and it was boring. So while the hype around its introduction was tremendous, it has been a total bust, which has only been made worse by the fact that the top guys at the firm have jumped ship.

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One (brief) beneficiary of The Truth rollout was a company called Phunware (PHUN), which as you can plainly see below had its own explosive move higher on tremendous volume. I think we can all agree that they shot their wad within those first couple of days.

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As for Twitter itself, I’m not sure what Elon is up to. As a chart, TWTR is certainly no gem of an investment, and frankly, I’d figure Mr. Musk kind of has his hands full with Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and the dozen or so children he’s produced so far. We live in interesting times.