Billion dollar tweet

There once was a young man who made a million dollars by creating a single page website called 'The million dollar homepage'. It was incredible. Pocketing a million dollars by innovating with flair.  Smart.   How about this - today there are people who can make or break a billion dollars with a mere tweet (a 140 character message on internet).

Is that really possible?

With a platform like Twitter, it very well is possible. Twitter can be thought of as the broadcast model of democracy - that can bring down Governments, as much as it can create or destroy brands and rake in a billion dollars in the process.

That is exactly what happened when Wall Street billionaire Carl Icahn tweeted about buying large volume of Apple Inc shares. The shares shot up with the tweet, resulting in a 17 billion dollar rise in the valuation. Going by the math, that is 62 million dollar per character (from the two tweets that were send).

Yet another time the number went to around 200 billion dollars with an 80 character tweet (that makes it over 2 billion per character). Only this time, it was a hoax tweet by a hacker!  Twitter terror hoax rocked Wall Street,  followed by a plummet in share value.

That had me thinking on the damages that lies when a certain technological innovation wound up in the hands of the wrong people ...