Elon Musk, Twitter, and What It Means For Future Investors

The whole game has changed.

I remember talking about the stock market with my grandfather. He would tell me things about reading quarterly reports or potentially seeing the names of the stocks he owned in the newspaper. If you wanted information about a company, you had to wait.

Imagine trying to explain this to a young investor today:

“Sorry, you can’t read about your stock or its earnings right now. But in two weeks, I’ll use the United States Postal Service to mail you a report about the latest quarter.”

An entire generation of American investors once lived like that. All of the information they got about their companies were random sightings in a newspaper, an occasional showing on TV, or a mailed report. That’s it.

I don’t think many investors could live like that that today. I also don’t think many investors really understand how easy it is to get information about any company, executive, or product. It’s all here. Somewhere on the Internet. It just takes skill, time to dig it up, and the ability to share it at scale.