> ...Social media is a cesspool right now,...

He would have greater impact if he used his account to not add to the cesspool, then. Much more than if he bought the company and kept tweeting like he does.

You know, a part of me hopes he makes it to Mars in my lifetime and just proceeds to take over the planet, running an alternative society there. Planet Musk: The Reality Show™ would be quite the thing to watch... from 140 million miles away.

But in this scenario Twitter is like Vanuatu planning world domination. They have absolutely no leverage to compel anbody to sign up for a Twitter account. Musk would need to spend significanty more money to do any of this, and frankly, I feel like he will spend the coming year being an election provocateur than do anything productive.

He lives off Twitter. His fame and fortune would not be where it’s without Twitter and he very well knows it. You can label that an emotional connection or even personal. I don’t think he out right planned to buy it. One thing after another, he found himself locked into - buying it.

Twitter wasnt profitable or sustainable so he s going to experiment in whatever way possible only to realize what everybody knows: mass media is not profitable in the financial sense, but in the political

done what exactly to himself?

hes still one of the wealthiest people on the planet. he could literally shutdown Twitter tomorrow and the people who’d cry the hardest are the ones cheering for twitters collapse, on Twitter, who refuse to leave.

elon is still running spacex, Twitter, and boring company. if he lost every dime and every company, he’d get the Silicon Valley vc funding, even in this economic climate, to go do the next thing.

one thing elon has done he doesn’t get credit for is ripping the mask off this massive grift in the tech industry. With over half of the Twitter workforce gone, the site runs just fine. what exactly were these people doing? in fact, they had little to no productive output of course with exception of their culture war/far left battles they were fighting in cahoots with government.

i digress but this grift is widespread across google, meta, amazon.. all big tech. class of professional managers and a propped up elite who produce little economic output. 20% of the biz drives bottom line for the other 80%’s empire building, territorial wars, and bloated bureaucratic nonsense.

no one wants to come out and say it in fear of attacks from the corporate media, but these execs are taking note from what Elon just pulled off, in big tech and Silicon Valley vc backed companies alike

I think this is backwards.

I think perhaps more accurately Musk wants to make ungodly amounts of money on selling the dream of settling Mars. Mars settlement is a monorail.

And I don't think Twitter is just noise. It appears to me that Musk knew exactly what he was doing and got the results he desired, knocking the value of Twitter down 11% for his own personal political and/or narcissistic agendas.

The only things Elon is planning to do with twitter is to silence his critics, become a Rupert Murdoch style figure, and keep manipulating stock prices.

The only part anyone would be playing is digging Musk out of the financial hole he created for himself.

"Give me money to rescue me from my bad business decisions!" is not much of a sales pitch.

Yeah, that would appear to be what's happening.

> So why all the hate?

For all its many many flaws, I personally enjoyed Twitter, and it was useful to many people. It is irritating to see it ruined by an idiot billionaire.

And hopefully his shrink.

> Maybe he's just trying to crash Twitter as opposed to restructure it financially.

That would explain at least some of his actions. It would allow him to chalk this one up to experience and move on. The path he's on right now will ultimately lead to the destruction of his personal brand (if we aren't there yet), Twitter, possibly Tesla and it has a non-zero chance of even affecting SpaceX due to national security concerns. No way they are going to trust a company like that with an unhinged leader privy to all of their secret stuff.

Which makes me wonder to what degree there is already headscratching going on there and with the respective authorities as to whether or not they have a security situation on their hands.

That kind of is sharing his money with the world.

> "How will people be motivated to work," the Republicans would say,

Why should they work if they don't want to? You have a replicator.

> how will we motivate people to join the Army?"

If this is so, then give replicator technology to the enemy and you won't need an army any more.

Well, the previous owners of Twitter are laughing with him, all the way to the bank.

>to own his political opponents

I don't see how throwing away a brand does that.

>maybe it was just a mistake he locked himself into

Again, I don't see how that's possible. What he locked himself into was buying Twitter at a stupid price. After he did that he could have simply kept Twitter as it was, which was what he paid for. If he was just going to remake Twitter into something completely different there was no need to buy it at all. He could have just built X from the start. You could argue that what he bought was Twitter's userbase, but that userbase exists because Twitter is the way it is, and there's no guarantee that it'll stick around once Musk finishes turning Twitter into X.

Hey now, if he only has $38B that means he can't afford to buy Twitter until Elon finishes destroying it.

Cruel and destructive?

That’s quite the extreme and bizarre interpretation of recent events, and it’s not very charitable. I hope you find something a bit more positive to focus your energies on.

The truth is, neither of us can know what the long term consequences of the leadership change will be but it’s almost certainly not worth doing this to yourself over it.

Because it has to pay $15B of its own takeover price and Elon scared away advertisers.

I hope somebody paid Elon handsomely for driving Twitter into the ground. Otherwise he doesn’t look very much like a good businessman.

Agreed. Bezos, Gates, Musk, etc don't buy media companies for money. They buy it for influence, propaganda, etc.

> Having said that I do question how far he would be able to take the free speech thing as a private company.

I like Musk and generally support things he is trying to do. But I'm not holding my breath. No way he allows twitter to be a free speech platform. Nobody spends $44 billion to allow others to have their say. Nobody spends $44 billion for other people's benefit. Maybe he'll make some symbolic gesture like letting trump back on the platform, but I'm guessing twitter will be his personal megaphone to push his products mostly.

Or maybe this is a watershed moment and elon's purchase of twitter is the start of a shift back to what the internet/social media used to be.

The pain is the result of Elon Musk overpaying 3x for a company he didn't want to buy and aggressively cost cutting to lower expenses.

1 billion a year in debt interest payments due to the 12 billion in loans he took on to purchase Twitter matches reality more closely than "accumulated managerial debt".

> Twitter will be fine operationally.

I'm unsure how anyone can say this with any confidence.

> Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party.

I think I met you at a gathering in SF once and had to walk away from the conversation.

For him there is. Twitter at $44b cash was not a business decision, it's something he arrived at through a level of reality-deflecting hubris and vindictiveness that remains unmatched by anyone since.

Remember how he appealed to Trump to return to the site, and Trump ignored him and stuck to Truth Social? He then tried to back his rival DeSantis with a campaign launch on Twitter, which failed miserably.

It's not 2016 anymore, Twitter's lost its pull as a political kingmaker and/or disinformation platform. That was the one thing Musk could realistically have expected his acquisition to still be able to deliver. Now that users and advertisers are fleeing and news sites are using Twitter sources less, he may as well bury the site, as it's outlived its usefulness to him.