At the end of his week-long Twitter adventure — buying 9% of the company's stock, taking a seat on its board and then abandoning it — Elon Musk posted a meme reading: "In all fairness, your honor, my client was in goblin mode." Then he deleted it.

• Goblin mode apparently means "I no longer care about what anyone thinks about how I look or what I say."

• Don't mind me, Musk seemed to be saying. I've just been putting you on.

Why it matters: Musk may just be one crazy-rich guy who loves to play the trickster-troll, but the manic style of corporate disruption he is pioneering is likely to be with the tech industry for a long time, Axios' Scott Rosenberg writes.

• That's because Musk's tactics are going to be irresistible for his legions of fans and imitators in the business world and for a new generation of investors schooled in his playbook.

"Activist investor" used to mean someone who starts buying stock in a company in order to force it to change how it operates.

• That would include the folks at Elliott Management, who took a run at Twitter in 2020 and ousted its CEO, Jack Dorsey, the next year.
• It's a hard-knuckled business that involves shareholder meetings, proxy fights and other complex corporate processes often managed by lawyers.
• Most of these investors aim to strip away what they view as costly, self-indulgent distractions so the firm can get back to earning more profit for owner/shareholders.

Musk seems to find all that boring. His idea of activist investing involves roasting the company's management in public (ideally, on their own social media platform) while frequently changing his own course.

• This method's strength is that it attracts attention, it hooks people on an unpredictable narrative, and it makes Musk himself look (to fans, at least) like a renegade rule-breaker.

The big picture: That approach has potent allure in the tech marketplace.

• It appeals to investors weaned on meme stocks,
• and to startup founders looking to stand out from the crowd,
• and to crypto enthusiasts trying to organize their companies and projects on Discord and govern them via DAOs.

Our thought bubble: Not everyone has Musk's 80 million followers or his billions of dollars. But anyone can put on a show.

The bottom line: No one knows what Musk will do next, probably not even Musk himself. He could still try for a hostile takeover of Twitter, or he could walk away. Whatever he does, it won't be done quietly.

Snapchat is rolling out a new product today that aims to make it easier for news publishers to upload their content in real time as stories break, Axios' Sara Fischer reports.

Why it matters: The update dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for news publishers — especially at the local level — to publish on Snapchat.

Details: Beginning Tuesday, more than 40 news publishers from around the world will begin using a new feature called Dynamic Stories that lets them publish stories to Snapchat using RSS feeds, a spokesperson told Axios.

• Examples of experimental news partners in the U.S. include CNN, ESPN, Insider, Axios, the New York Post, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, TMZ, Vice and more.

How it works: The conversion process from stories on the web to Snapchat is automated, and most web publishing systems today already produce RSS feeds, so that newsrooms don't need to do extra legwork.

• The stories will be available via Snapchat's curated content platform Discover.

Be smart: Snap will sell vertical video ads on the new Dynamic Stories product and share some of the revenue with publishers.

The big picture: Snapchat has worked with news companies for years to develop custom content for its curated content platform, Discover. But previous products were more labor intensive and harder to update.

The internet oligarchs are playing catch-up with cryptocurrencies, tentatively tiptoeing into the kiddie pool with waders on — floaties, too, Axios Crypto's Brady Dale reports.

Why it matters: These companies have huge networks, and if one of them finds a way for crypto to complement their business, they could switch on millions of new users with the stroke of a digital pen.

What they're saying: "The market size is too big to ignore now," Electric Capital managing partner Avichal Garg, an alum of both Facebook and Google, told Axios. "Everyone under 30 is doing this so, to stay relevant, they have to."

Details:

• Twitter made a special emoji for #bitcoin forever ago. Recently, it has offered a tipping function in bitcoin. Plus, users who want to show off a favorite NFT can verify they own it.
• EBay makes NFTs available to buy on the site (but don't look for any of these to be the next Bored Apes).
• Paypal might launch its own stablecoin, a cryptocurrency designed to track the price of regular money (probably the dollar).
• Reddit, the so-called front page of the internet, had been the top spot for crypto conversation until Twitter usurped it. Nevertheless, these days, it is slowly experimenting with tokenizing community points.

Yes, but:

• Telegram, the messaging app with more people on it than live in the United States, tried to launch a cryptocurrency long before Facebook, and it got shot down first.
• Microsoft has been nosing around in crypto since forever. In 2015, it launched a blockchain-as-a-service product. In 2021, it quietly backed away. (Google seems to be stepping into the space that Microsoft vacated.)
• Discord, the forum for gamers, vaguely hinted at some crypto integration, but got scared off almost immediately.

The most epic crypto flameout in Web2 award — without a question — goes to the company now known as Meta, which launched Libra, changed it to Diem, and then finally sold it for parts in February.

Subscribe to the new Axios Crypto daily newsletter.

On Tap

• Fluids, rest, soup and binge-watching whatever is on Canadian Netflix.
• Oh, for you all, right. Well, TED continues through Thursday in Vancouver. And Apple CEO Tim Cook is speaking this morning at the International Association of Privacy Professionals' Global Privacy Summit.

Trading Places

• Hewlett-Packard Enterprise announced the hiring of Trish Damkroger as chief product officer for the company's HPC & AI business. She was previously a VP at Intel.
• Lyft named Emma Rindels, previously a legislative assistant to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, as a federal policy manager, and Alix Lowe-Server, previously a senior adviser for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand as a federal policy adviser.

ICYMI

• Meta is testing the ability to sell digital goods in its Horizon virtual world, with the Facebook parent company taking a 25% cut. (The Verge)
• Meta spent almost $27 million on security last year for its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to a recent filing. (Bloomberg)

Over the weekend (before I came down with COVID), I started a thing on social media to send some love to trans and nonbinary kids. No money, no politics, just letters of support.

I would be honored for interested Login readers to join in. You can post to Twitter, FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever. Just use #Letters4TransKids. I'm already blown away by some of the responses.