Rumors are that he plans to WeChatify twitter under X.com, so there’s more of a chance that twitter gets put under something larger and becomes neighbors with Square.
and then what? Twitter is one of those platform in which overeducated, depressed, insane and innocently malicious kids goes to deploy engineered narratives and absolutely unprofitably destructively dominate over people of all ages and identities. Normies has no place in it, and if anyone is going to change that, the platform just bleeds and eventually dies. It’s a 4.4chan-Lite. What comes of normalizing and integrating it into the society, even to Musk himself in short term?
I think you misstate the complete twitter sphere, but even still if you have a public platform used by all ages and identities, to which you add a commerce and payments platform and improved messaging, I think you would have something. The hardest thing to get is critical mass and Twitter has it. Musk believes twitter has been mismanaged, and may be squandering it, but that’s why he’s buying it.
I think Twitter will become better when everybody who left for Gab, Mastodon, Gettr, Truth social, etc, all come back. Conversations that are more representative of what the public actually thinks (no matter how much you might hate what they say) are more useful than echo chambers.
I can't predict what Musk will do, but I'm under the distinct impression he's trying to allow free speech for everybody, get rid of bots, improve the tech (allow editing a tweet), and potentially hold people to account better by not allowing (or deranking) anonymous accounts. There's also leaked chat with Jack Dorsey about making an open interoperable protocol. Twitter would not die if it opened it's protocol and federated. As a public company that would destroy the ability to profit, but as a private company he can do that.
I have a lot of faith in Elon based on past results. He already solved the problem of people who don't believe in climate change - he got them to buy electric cars because they are sexy. Brilliant man.
> I have a lot of faith in Elon based on past results. He already solved the problem of people who don't believe in climate change - he got them to buy electric cars because they are sexy. Brilliant man.
Wow that's a grim perspective. Somehow I doubt that catering to the consumerism that got us to where we are with climate change is what's going to help us fix it.
There's a lot to dislike about Elon Musk (mostly related to his lack of filter) but he has founded multiple successful companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars each. It's possible he'll somehow make twitter worse than it is and starts hemorrhaging users, but if I had to choose I'd bet on Twitter ending up in a better place than it is now.
Mr Musk is unambiguously both brilliant and a complete ass, and I think people who underestimate him or lionise him are both wrong.
That said, I think he is buying Twitter for the lulz / weird libertarian reasons, rather than making a real business out of it, and I have serious concerns it will injure what is currently a public utility absolutely beyond repair.
He's buying it for the same reason all other billionaires buy media outlets, to be able to push their narrative onto the public consciousness. Social media isn't what users post, it's which user posts the algorithm decides to show. For someone with a conglomerate with many interests and huge ambition, owning popular media can be very profitable even if the media outlet itself isn't.
