Social Media is a very perplexing arena for me and I find myself thinking about it a lot and pondering its place in the universe. My exposure to it began in 1998 when I invested in a start-up called Six Degrees. The “six degrees of separation” idea comes from a few places. The original concept traces to Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who in a 1929 short story called Chains proposed that any two people on Earth could be connected through a chain of no more than five intermediaries (six links total). The famous experiment came from sociologist Stanley Milgram in 1967. He had people in Nebraska and Kansas try to get a letter to a stranger in Boston by passing it only through people they knew personally. The letters that arrived averaged about six handshakes, thereby giving us the phrase “six degrees of separation”. The pop culture moment that cemented it all was the 1990 play (later 1993 film) Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare, and then the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in 1994, which made the concept a cultural touchstone. The math behind it was later formalized by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz in 1998, who showed mathematically how “small world” networks — where most nodes cluster locally but a few long-range connections exist — can produce very short average path lengths even in enormous networks. It’s essentially a property of how social networks are structured. Even in a world of billions, a handful of well-connected “hubs” dramatically collapse the degrees between any two strangers. That investment in Six Degrees caused me to understand venture capital investing in turbulent markets since my $160,000 investment became worth $1.9 million in a year (on paper), only to crash and burn with the dot-bomb in another year to being worth $60,000. When Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, those of us who had invested (and lost the fish that got away) found ourselves shaking our heads. I don’t feel too bad since Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace in 2005 and saw that dwindle away as Facebook marched forward. That start to my social networking awareness is probably the root cause of my ambivalence to the whole topic.
My relationship with Facebook specifically took a turn for the worse in 2008 (a year after my personal debacle at Bear Stearns Asset Management) when a student of mine told me that my Facebook page was becoming a scene of crime in the form of personal character assassination. I shut it down, but have never been able to completely cleanse the system of all traces of me, which is mildly disturbing. I run into people every day who tell me they steadfastly avoid any and all connection to social media. Needless to say, they are generally the older crowd given the 95% adoption rate by the younger generations. The most popular platforms are YouTube (Google), which has the broadest daily engagement, with Instagram (Meta/Facebook) (58%) and TikTok (ByteDance) (56%) forming a clear top tier. Snapchat (still an independent public company) maintains strong use at 68% weekly, while Facebook, who’s original platform is fading fast) sees just 16% daily usage from Gen Z — mainly for group interactions. Personally, I use Instagram and Snapchat to keep in touch with my kids’ goings-on, and I am like everyone on the planet who turns to YouTube to figure out how to do shit that I otherwise don’t understand. As for TikTok, my youngest son is a big TikToker, so he occasionally sends me clips he has done.
I need to point out that I am a reasonably active user of LinkedIn, which is considered Social Media though it occupies a gray zone that sparks genuine debate. The case is that it has all the core mechanics of Social Media — profiles, followers, a feed, likes, comments, sharing, and direct messaging, but LinkedIn’s purpose is professional networking and career development rather than personal social connection or entertainment. The content norms, user intent, and business model are distinct from platforms like Instagram or TikTok…but those content norms are being continually tested by users who stray into politics or opinions. Nevertheless, in practice, most researchers, marketers, and statisticians include it in the “Social Media” category — you’ll see it listed alongside Facebook and Twitter in Pew Research surveys and industry reports. But users and companies often treat it separately, with its own strategy and tone. It’s owned by Microsoft, which acquired it in 2016 for $26.2 billion, one of the largest tech acquisitions ever at the time. My generation has a comfort with Microsoft and Apple that we don’t necessarily share with Meta/Facebook/Instagram and certainly not TikTok/ByteDance (though Oracle, Silver lake, MGX and Michael Dell, who are the 80% owners of the new TikTok entity, might disagree). As for Google/YouTube…that seems to fall on the dividing line.
While on Instagram checking on the kids, they have lured me into all kinds of purchases and new thought patterns, some of which have found their way into my inbox as quasi-spam. I say quasi because they are really good at capturing topics that are of interest to me, but when I see an email source that looks too “commercial” I know its best to be wary. I get a lot of “Elon Musk says to do this….”, which is a red flag warning to stay away for me. One of those did break through because it was about something called the Kardashev Project. There’s no single thing called the “Kardashev Project”, but the term captures a broad framework Musk has been invoking repeatedly for his interconnected ventures. The Kardashev scale was proposed in 1964 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev and ranks civilizations by how much energy they can control. Type I means planetary-scale energy use. Type II means harnessing an entire star’s output (think Project Hail Mary). Type III means galactic-scale energy. Humanity is currently estimated at around Type 0.7, still far from fully exploiting even Earth’s available energy. It seems that Musk recently announced a new $20 billion chip fabrication plant near Austin called “Terafab”, framing it as a step toward advancing Earth along the Kardashev scale. The joint initiative involves SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla, and will undoubtedly get lots of hype on X, Musk’s preferred brand of Social Media. The facility would be unlike anything existing, a single location where logic, memory, packaging, testing, and iterative mask/design work happen in a continuous loop. The target is staggering: Musk estimates current global AI compute output at roughly 20 gigawatts per year, and claims the combined output of all existing fabricators (TSMC, Samsung, Micron, etc.) accounts for only 2% of the Terafab’s requirements. Musk has also proposed deploying AI computing centers in space, arguing that within four to five years, running large-scale AI systems in orbit will be more cost-effective than terrestrial alternatives. And, of course we need all that compute power to drive Social Media forward. SpaceX filed with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites in low Earth orbit (floating space junk, which we can only hope won’t rain on our heads), designed as solar-powered orbital data centers, described as “a first step toward becoming a Kardashev Type II civilization”. A lunar base is part of the picture too and he’s suggested it could produce 100 terawatts of electricity per year and manufacture solar-powered AI satellites on-site, using a mass driver to launch them to escape velocity.
Musk’s Kardashev Project is the philosophical framework linking Terafab, space-based AI compute, Starlink, solar energy, and probably Social Media, all aimed at moving civilization up the Kardashev ladder. I will bet that somewhere at the top of that ladder live Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Huang, Altman, Brin and Page with Ellison and Dell trying to push their way in. Something tells me we are gonna need a very good hook and ladder brigade to fight back the coming Social Media / AI / Space Junk / Data Center MegaFab complex that will define the next conflagration for civilization.