Asmongold and Elon Musk Discuss Potential Collaboration to Boost X Live Streaming
We’ve learned that popular streamer Asmongold and X owner Elon Musk are reportedly exploring ways to team up to enhance X as a platform for live streaming. Asmongold has apparently made a significant offer: he is willing to stream on X for about 20 hours per week for free. This potential partnership has generated considerable excitement among many users on X.
From our perspective, supporting Asmongold in streaming to X aligns with a fundamental principle we advocate: don’t have all your eggs in one basket. We believe all creators, including ourselves, should be multistreaming everywhere possible – X, Rumble, Kick, YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms. Multistreaming was embraced early by the “free speech” community as a necessary measure; if you get deplatformed from one site, you need others established. This strategy also helps maximize reach and discover new audience members.
Asmongold has indicated he could dedicate considerable time to this. He even offered to help get the X website “up to par” for live streaming, potentially working on it for around a month, stating it wouldn’t be a major issue for him. He has also publicly stated that he doesn’t care about receiving payment for this effort. His motivation, as he describes it, is that it’s simply better for the platform and everyone involved, and he would do it for free given his existing financial comfort.
However, we believe that transforming X into a viable live streaming platform is a very challenging and significant undertaking, far beyond just a simple restreaming setup. There are several crucial areas that need substantial development:
- Chat Experience: The current chat system on X is described as “atrocious.” A good chat interface is essential as viewers love to interact and read chat.
- Monetization: Features like gifting, subscriptions, and other monetization options are critical. Big streamers who don’t face deplatforming pressures won’t move to X unless they can make significant income there. We’ve seen on platforms like Kick and Rumble that relying on deals to attract streamers doesn’t always result in long-term commitment.
- Discoverability: Finding live streams is a major issue on most new alternative platforms, including X.
- Viewer Reporting: X does not accurately report live concurrent viewers; it shows a cumulative view count, which appears to be an intentional design choice to inflate view numbers.
Developing X for live streaming also involves significant technical challenges, particularly bandwidth issues, which X already struggles with. We think that for X to become a serious live streaming competitor, it would likely need to be a completely separate experience or a bolt-on application, rather than trying to fundamentally change the core text-and-news website that X is today. We estimate this level of infrastructure development would cost several hundred million dollars minimum, significantly more than a few million. While that’s a large sum, it’s potentially within reach for Elon Musk. The majority of X’s hundreds of millions of monthly users primarily use it for text and news, not video.
Live streaming, along with short-form video, represents the future of online content. The traditional model of shorter, produced news bites is becoming less viable for building large audiences. This is why we heavily focus on our live streams.
Asmongold is arguably one of the most-watched streamers globally. If he were to consistently stream on X, it would be a “very seismic” event. However, doing so before the platform is ready would likely be ineffective. We strongly hope he considers also streaming to platforms like Rumble, which we see as already quite capable. Rumble offers features important to streamers like advertisers, subscriptions, and gifted subs, and its discovery is improving. The perception of Rumble being solely a “right-wing website” is inaccurate; it’s a platform used by a diverse group, including many gamers and personalities like Dr. Disrespect. Our advice is not to choose one platform over another, but to commit fully to multistreaming everywhere.
It’s notable that this potential collaboration comes after a public disagreement between Asmongold and Elon Musk regarding gaming. Ultimately, while Elon’s interest may tie into increasing X’s valuation through new content types, Asmongold’s massive popularity stems from being relatable – a “regular dude” with a mix of opinions, which resonates with a broad audience. This broad appeal sets him apart from hyper-political creators whose audiences may be more niche.
Considering Asmongold’s deep understanding of the streaming space and what users want, we believe it could potentially be worthwhile for Elon to offer him a consulting fee, perhaps in the range of $5-10 million, to guide the development of X’s streaming features. Fundamentally, we see more competition in the streaming industry as a positive outcome for creators and viewers alike.
