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Why is Elon Musk doing what he is to Twitter?
From a non-MAGA’ers perspective;
He took a perfectly fine (albeit starting to decline) social media platform with millions of users and derailed it completely from what it was before to a farce.
Why even buy Twitter if you’re going to change the entire format, including the actual name of the brand? Why not build a competitor from the ground up and call it X?
Unless you’re the melonhead billionaire your guess is better than mine, but I wonder if this bumbling incompetence is pre-orchestrated somehow or if he’s making it up as he goes.
People who subscribe to right-wing or alt-right ideology often have utopian ideas about a "free speech haven." They truly believe that they are being stifled and shut down in the mainstream forums. Whether they are or not, whether they deserve it or not, that's a whole different debate that I'm not personally getting into.
Many websites have tried this free speech absolutism thing and it hasn't gone well. Voat, Gabb, the "dot win" websites centered around Trump, etc. have all tried this, and there will be more because everyone keeps thinking they can do it better this time.
Musk is worse than those people. Because he thinks he can do it better this time and he is also rich. He has a level of immaturity that only the obscenely wealthy are able to carry into their later adult years without consequence. His hubris is so great that he thinks he can do moderation, web development, marketing, user retention, branding, and all other aspects of running a website better than Twitter. He saw Twitter as some kind of leftist, run-by-soy-boys, run-by-idiots, arm of the deep state that only he could fix. As a bonus to him, he gets to share his bizarre alt-right views with a broader audience for now.
As others have said, the simple version of this is that Musk is a petulant, wealthy, narcissistic child.
This is a good argument against monarchies and oligarchical systems in general.
In the UK for example the royal family has a very effective PR machine, resulting in (small-r) republican sentiment being in a relatively small minority. People on the whole were very fond of Lizzie because of her 'tireless work' on behalf of good causes, and that sentiment extends to the Royal family in general. They do so much for our country! Aren't we lucky.
We see fawning over billionaires because aren't they impressive and aspirational, and oh my look at the philanthropy!
But the corollary of all that is what if people you have no influence on use their power for things you don't like rather than things you do? There's still nothing you can do about it.
Many people also enjoy the scandals and drama. Divorces are just as popular as weddings.
I think there's something in human nature that likes stories about celebrities. In ancient times, the Greeks and Norse had their gods, who where also loving and hating each other. We ditched the gods and filled the gaps with real humans, but everything else stays the same.
That' a bit of a stretch comparing the queen to musk. Does not sound like a good faith argument.
The comparison is oligarchs behaving in oligarchical ways.
The fact Brenda is seen positively because she did 'things lots of people like' and musk is seen increasingly negatively because he's doing things 'lots of people dislike' makes the point very nicely.
No one has any control over either direction.
One could argue that musk has more power than Elizabeth did in her last years. Could you expand on the good faith argument part?
Both have a certain charisma. One gets it through virtue signaling, one gets it through vice signalling.
She and her representatives were an extremely destructive influence on many former colonies. I think it's apt.
Eh, we know if we don't have the Royal families we'll have an elected president and that person is going to be some cunt like Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone or Tony Blair or god knows who.
This is where I come down on it. I’m not so much pro-royalty as I am anti-letting the British public vote for their own head of state. Frankly, after the last several years, I’m anti-them voting for anything ever again.
Lots of countries have both an elected head of government and an elected head of state. It doesn't really matter though, everyone knows the German president (as opposed to the chancellor) is just a figurehead and no one pays the president any attention.
In my opinion, this analysis confuses cause and effect.[Edit: on a second reading of the post title/your comment, it does seem like a good analysis of Elon Musk's current state of mind.]So let me ask a different question: how did he end up in this situation? I'd guess Elon Musk was center/center-left leaning for most of his life, or at least pretty politically indifferent in the sense that culture war issues and whatnot never really affected him (but consider this an open invitation to gish-gallop me; for what it's worth, there's also the wikipedia article "Views of Elon Musk", although most of it concerns things he said after 2020).
Some surface-level observations to support this hypothesis:
But at some point (after 2010, when he joined Twitter), Elon Musk realized he was getting better engagement with his right-leaning followers than his left-leaning followers, and that slowly led him down the alt-right misinformation rabbit hole. It's like the difference in popularity between Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act, where conservatives are more likely to support Obamacare so long as they don't know Obama had anything to do with it. Once people have picked a side, they default to assuming that everything their side supports is good and everything the other side supports is bad. That's how he managed to position himself as a free speech absolutist (probably something he originally believed) while simultaneously threatening to ban people for using the word "TERF" (a belief he adopted through exposure to/engagement with alt-right media).
I think this is a form of audience capture. Musks's persona† has always been heterodox or 'quirky', and he has portrayed himself as a sort of postmodern Renaissance man with insight (or genius) in any area of his interest. He also acts as if he seeks popularity.
The combined effect may have been that he was particularly sensitive to his engagement, particularly when he was speaking 'personally' and extemporaneously rather than acting as a stuffy CEO with official company-related PR. I also think your observation is quite plausible, that his outbursts attracted more positive attention from the right than the left‡, over time molding his (expressed) opinions towards that side of the political spectrum. It may have also helped that this alignment worked with his economic interests. If he maintained centre-left politics, there would be more dissonance in (for example) moving his operations to Texas for its lighter regulatory environment.
Now that Musk is in full audience capture mode, he may think his views legitimately popular – after all, all the real people in his feed tell him so. Pushback isn't genuine, but instead it's nefarious government/interest group propaganda or 'bots', leading to a real but mistaken belief that there was some sort of conspiracy of Twitter censorship to keep him from becoming even more popular. Now that he owns the company, he may be searching for the magic "censorship off-switch" that would truly reveal his greatness to the masses.
† — I don't know the man, so if I'm being careful I can't say anything about his personality, just his potentially-curated projection thereof.
‡ — With the mainstream left being 'mainstream', and the far left seeing itself inherently opposed to billionare CEOs, I can't imagine a world where Musk went down the Tankie path instead.
I wasn't familiar with this term, but that's exactly what I was trying to express. Thanks!
I think this and the "audience capture" phenomenon that u/majromax described are both important. But I think there's another issue that pushed Musk towards the right.
I think there is a great deal of evidence that Musk is a narcissist. While SpaceX makes a good deal of money off of government contracts, the government is more of a hindrance to Tesla. (Especially once Teslas stopped qualifying for tax credits.) This is especially came to a head during the pandemic when California objected to Tesla's working conditions. With the right's support of laissez-faire economics and COVID denialism, conservative states like Texas are much more willing to give Musk what he wants. He has goals and his employees are instruments of his will. I'm sure he does not like it when other people interfere with him doing whatever he wants to achieve his goals. Thus, I think he is being pushed towards a more right-libertarian point of view because he chafes at having anyone tell him what to do. He's smarter than those other people and knows better than them with the right thing to do is. When the left is full of critics and the right is full of fans (as far as he sees), it makes the right much more appealing.
On a similar note, Musk once stated that his goal for Tesla was to drive (no pun intended) the adoption of EVs because of the dangers of climate change. But I think it's telling how hostile he is to Tesla competitors. It's no longer enough that Tesla be a groundbreaking EV manufacturer – Tesla has to be the #1 EV manufacturer. At the end of the day, his greed and self-interest trumps whatever high-minded principles might have underpinned his support of Tesla in the early days.
Considering yourself a centrist isn't actually a statement about yourself - it's saying "most people approximately agree with me; as many people disagree with me on one side as on the other". It's also saying "I'm not extreme or crazy".
If someone describes themselves as a centrist I assume they either don't understand politics or don't care enough about it to think through their own political position.
Yep, this sums it up pretty well.
The thing about Elon is that he's not actually a genius, didn't actually found Tesla, isn't actually an engineer, etc.
He's just a medium talent guy who got lucky with Paypal and bought into Tesla and rode that to riches.
Not to pile on, but I think it’s important to also add that he has average intelligence at best. Which just goes to show what being born into wealth can do for a guy.
This is unrealistic. He has a physics degree and was in a graduate program in Stanford. He’s also a software developer who made and sold high value projects before PayPal. Honestly, people claiming he is somehow just lucky but stupid sounds like sour grapes.
I think there are 3 points I’d like to make about using his academic qualifications as a shorthand for intelligence
That level of intelligence really isn’t uncommon. There are many, many people who, if we’re just talking about intelligence, would be able to do the coursework for a physics degree at U Penn or participate in a graduate programme at Stanford. There are many other reasons why most people with that intelligence can’t do the above. Intelligence qua intelligence is not a rare commodity.
There are plenty of people with his qualifications who have unremarkable bog standard careers. Elon’s success was due to factors beyond his intelligence. Many of those factors might be tied up with his family wealth and background, others might have to do with his ethical attitudes and so forth.
INT =/= WIS
I’m not disagreeing with much of what you said, what I’m disagreeing with is the claim that Musk has “average intelligence at best.” The implication especially that he might be actually of below average intelligence.
Stanford physics grad programs are not filled with “average” intelligence. They are filled with people who are at bare minimum, reasonably smart. Not necessarily geniuses, but not average people and absolutely not stupid people.
On top of this - he never wanted to actually buy Twitter in the first place. I believe he wanted to strong-arm Twitter into changing its policies and also make a very public spectacle of being told they wouldn't sell to him. In short - he was bluffing. He had his bluff called. He desperately tried to get out of the deal. It would have been cheaper for him to burn the $1B to walk away, but his ego wouldn't allow that.
Now that he's got it, he's the dog that caught the mail truck. He's got no idea what to do with it.
Twitter was far from perfect before he came along but the only smart people involved in this mess are the ones who cashed out.
I completely neglected to even mention that part and I think you're absolutely right.
Because he’s an idiot. Simple as.
I see a lot of folks here and elsewhere talking about how this must be intentional — clearly, Musk was paid off, or simply wanted to kill Twitter! But I find this ridiculous. Not only does it violate Hanlon’s Law, but it smells to me like the same kind of “I don’t understand it, therefore it must have a complicated answer” thinking that often underpins conspiracy theories.
As far as I’m concerned, he’s just a dumbass with a massive ego and a fetish for a crappy domain name he bought ages ago, and this is what it looks like when you give someone like that control over a major media company. It doesn’t need to be anything more.
Then why not buy it and shut it down? It's his property now, if he wants to completely burn the investment then there's nothing stopping him. Just fire everyone and shut off the servers.
I don’t think it goes deeper, but putting on a tinfoil hat for the sake of fun and argument…
Simply shutting it down after purchase would make it suspicious. It’s a lot of money to buy just so he could kill it because he doesn’t like it, so people might start looking for the real reason or even another backer in the shadows.
If he buys it and runs it into the ground while acting like a fickle, arrogant child… well… that just looks like ol’ Elon being Elon, at least on the surface
But for this explanation to be true, Elon would have to be willing to look like a complete and total dipshit to the public. He'd have to be willing to be the man who bought one of the most popular social media sites and was so incompetent he ran it into the pavement. He is that man, but he has such an ego he would never put it on as an act.
Yeah this is my feeling too. Especially with the new "X" branding- he has been chasing this idea of an "everything company" for years, and his diverse portfolio reflects that in a way. Someone on twitter had mentioned that he was voted off of Paypal because he wanted to change the domain/branding to "x.com", so to a lot of people its no surprise that he's back with this to finish that goal.
The guy is a complete egomanic, he thinks he's the smartest person in the room, and there are enough yes-men around him that he is completely detached from reality.
Yeah, definitely. Dudes a fucking idiot. But everyone conflates success and money with intelligence on some level, even if subconsciously, so people are desperate to see a plan when there is only idiocy.
Yeah, exactly. The damage Musk is doing to his net worth by spending $40B of it on Twitter and then gratuitously setting that investment aflame pales in comparison to the damage he's ultimately going to do by flip-flopping his personal reputation and demonstrating in about the most public way imaginable the extreme depths of his idiocy and immaturity.
Also, the latter damages his ego, too, which all evidence indicates he values far higher than any amount of money.
There are/were definitely entities out there with the desire to destroy Twitter. Musk pretty clearly wasn't one of them, but even if he was, this is not the way he would have gone about it.
He borrowed money from banks to buy Twitter, I bet they could sue him if he just simply shot Twitter behind the woodshed.
He also borrowed from Qatar and a Saudi prince it seems. Via Bloomberg:
Link
I feel like Saudi money contributing to the end of the world's largest free speech platform is probably not a coincidence..
But I also see Musk has been weird for this 'x' this for decades.
I know Hanlon's law, but this seems awfully fortuitous for certain authoritarians.
Both can be true.
Elon can have his "X" and the Saudis can harm free speech if it fails or make more money if it had succeeded. Heads they win, tails they win.
Exactly - plausible deniability. You cannot just openly destroy a big chunk of your nation's public forum because it is convenient to your backers from a certain nation not so friendly to yours. I mean, I do not know much about US laws, but based on the deep expertise I gained by watching a lot of US movies, this would be the moment when black helicopters start circling around your house.
Musk doesn't totally own Twitter. He has private investors/loans that helped him close the deal. So if his goal was the ultimate destruction of the site, he's still got to abide by those people and contracts while doing it.
Because he's an idiot. I agree with the OP here. Elon Musk is a very stupid but very rich man. The amount of money Elon has sort of acts like gravity, in that it's so big it can only amass more money. But Elon was never a rags to riches guy; his parents were very rich with the kind of money that even idiot sons can look successful.
Reminds me of the popular saying:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Furthermore, despite all the conspiracy nuts working hard to prove otherwise, life is rarely that crazy and the boring, reasonable explanation is often the correct one.
That's Hanlon's Law, which LukeZaz referred to.
Thank you. I'm so tired of the narrative that billionaires like Musk must be smart people, when almost all of them were just born into wealth (Musk included). He's literally just an idiot with money and weird obsessions. I'm tired of people pretending he's got some enlightened vision for the website he was forced to buy when he's demonstrably been a terrible manager for it.
The most popular conspiracy theory I've heard is that Musk has political ambitions. Now that Donald Trump's political career is over and he is about to be sentenced, where will his overly large fan base go? Certainly not to that DeSantis who they regard as more of an "establishment" or centrist kinda leader but they'll try to find hero in someone like Elon Musk who resembles Trump in many ways (very eccentric and moody, riles up the crowd with the right things to say, etc.).
The theory is that Musk (and whoever is backing Musk in this endeavor) is preparing their own voter base from this now dispersed Trump fan base and this is a theory that makes sense when you make 2 plus 2 equals 4. It's a theory that sort of fits into the jigsaw puzzle of what's happening in US politics currently.
It wouldn't matter if Trump voters turn to Musk. He couldn't become president since he wasn't born in the U.S.
He could run for some lesser office (like Schwarzenegger did) but would probably find it beneath his dignity.
He could support somebody like Ron DeSantis who he might hope will owe him something. (Like permits and contracts for his space work.)
I think some people, like Scott Adams, were made really crazy by the Trump phenomenon. There’s a certain kind of rich guy who is drawn to right wing politics like a moth to a flame but Trump demonstrates this ability to get adulation from (some) people that others wish they could imitate.
If there is any reason this should end badly, very badly, for Musk is that it sets a bad example and could lead other people to do similar things.
Yeah he's definitely going the DeSantis route, especially with his campaign announcement "interview" thing that bombed on Twitter
I’m not sure how to read DeSantis. On one hand he looks like he is “living the dream” by “owning the libs” with real legislation in Florida, but the truth is that people don’t care about the culture war that much. In this poll
https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/04/Fox_April-21-24-2023_National_Topline_April-26-Release.pdf
they ask people what the top issue facing the country is (Q22) and only 1% reply “wokeness/transgender issues”. It’s not that people don’t care at all but they care about many other issues more, particularly the economy.
Although DeSantis can show a lot of success at working within the system, he doesn’t have the “outsider” appeal that Trump does. At this point Trump’s own identity and tribulations provide a better “issue” than any other candidate can.
I would absolutely pump the brakes on that line of thought until he is actually experiencing consequences of his actions and is unable (in one way or another) to win an election. Thusfar he is still a free man, the leading Republican candidate for 2024 and his opponents in the primary are all way behind him in popularity.
That said: Go legal system go! I look forward to watching the various cases against him continue to unfold, as he has a lot to answer for.
The fact that any large-ish group of voters would regard DeSantis as too center-“leaning” is somewhat ridiculous in itself.
If Elon Musk wants that demographic as his new “fan base”/political following, sure, but it is… telling.
Personally, I feel like there's a blend of incompetence and malice at play. Some of his actions are absolutely just him wanting to give the middle finger and chase off naysayers. I do think, especially at the very start, he's held some bitterness over being forced to go through with buying Twitter. Some of that felt like a bit of petty revenge on his part.
Overall though, I think the best word to sum up his handling of Twitter is "immature". Every action has just shown striking immaturity, whether it be the categorically stupid decisions to lay off so much staff and stop services he didn't know anything about thus breaking 2FA, to branding NPR as "government-funded" or whatever that label was and the whole poop emoji auto-response.
He's never exited the edgy teenager phase. It just took us a while to realize that.
I think he honestly started buying into the real-life Tony Stark hype that people were attributing to him before he started opening his dumb mouth (seems to have started when he called the diver guy a pedophile). So he just assumes he has the Midas touch, that nothing he does can ever be wrong, he's a genius, he's Iron Man. He has a bachelors in Economics and Physics but really doesn't seem to know a whole lot about anything, despite pretending to be an expert in everything.
That's... technically correct. He may have actual degrees in his name, however due to some interesting discrepancies on the details, the jury's still out on whether or not they were actually earned through schoolwork
That's hilarious, and DEFINITELY gives the impression he got an econ degree, told people it was also a physics degree, and bought it retroactively when he got pinched lol
The paperwork doesn't even list a major ffs
I would argue that conspiracy theories often attempt to make things simpler, rather than more complex. They render large, complicated phenomena into something simple; almost always an act of malice by a person or an institution with power. The explanations become complex when they are challenged, but the core of the conspiracy theory remains rather simple.
In this case, they are taking the complexities of all of Musk's poor decision-making and simplifying it down to just one motive: a secret plan to destroy a platform that Musk was obsessed with.
I agree, but I also want to point out that he tried to back out of buying Twitter before being legally forced to. Twitter was not profitable when he took over, and (according to some estimates) he overpaid for it by about $20 billion.
He made a lot of incredibly stupid and impulsive decisions in his scramble to make it profitable, which ironically drove away advertisers and users and made his situation even worse.
I think it's just people idolizing billionaires like they are taught to do by (neo)liberalism.
The only difference between Elon Musk and a regular troll is that most trolls don't have 44 billion dollars laying around.
Replace "troll" with "Twitter addict" and I'd agree.
To play armchair psychiatrist for a minute:
Correction: His slightly overdrawn joke (just a joke bro!) about buying Twitter, until some lawyers told him that no, you did way too much actual offer to label it a joke now, sorry, you got to actually buy it.
It's like when the Brexit happened and it was pretty obvious most politicians didn't actually want a Brexit, they just campaigned for it as a way of rattling their sabers.
Personally, I think he really did want to buy Twitter, at least initially. But by the time his friends/colleagues/lawyers talked sense into him, it was too late.
Elon wants Twitter to become the western equivalent of WeChat.
WeChat has (among other things):
Elon's ADHD Billionaire brain is trying to make it all happen as fast as possible, he just sees the end goal and not the million steps required to get there (Coastline Paradox). Maybe he'll get there, maybe he won't. But as a someone who has never actually engaged with Twitter I do enjoy watching him try.
There are lots of WeChat clones in se Asia that are not government backed. Line. Grab. Gojek. Etc. All have some mix of Food delivery, chat, money sending, taxis, etc. They're not WeChat big, but they operate in smaller countries too.
You could build Twitter into one maybe. But I don't get why you'd throw away the branding before you even start. I was out when musk bought it though.
agreed on the use of ADHD in the comment you replied to (you can just say impulsive if you mean impulsive), but Elon has said he has Asperger's (iirc he announced it when he hosted SNL) which would put him on the autism spectrum.
He probably has some ideas left over from his PayPal days that he is forcing Twitter into incorporating. He pushed X pretty hard back then as well. Maybe Twitter will become the WeChat of the world, the new verification/subscription/monetization system points in that direction.
But to be clear, this is killing Twitter. Whatever comes out of it, success or failure, will not feel like Twitter.
Has Facebook made a payments so yet? If yes then they're kinda in feature parity.
The difference is Facebook does not have the cultural buy in in the west that wechat has in China, and also does not put these other activities front and centre. The latter is easy to solve, sure, but even if they bought garmin pay, who's probably the largest independent player in this space and had a payments system tomorrow, I think it's still a lot more open to competition.
Well there might have been some cultural buy in for Twitter, but this X thing? Nothing.
Starlink also plays hell with amateur and professional astronomers. It's getting increasingly common to get starlink satellites in photographs because of their massive numbers and low orbits.
Starlink also just covers areas that already have satellite internet, and for cheaper than what he charges. So much for bringing internet to areas without it.
All he did was pollute low earth orbit.
To be fair to satellite Internet, there are two mitigating factors:
Satellites in non-geosynchronous orbit move around. Any restriction on coverage to under-served areas would be artificial; the satellites would be around anyway.
Geostationary satellite Internet has extremely high latency thanks to the speed of light. A signal going from the client ground, to the satellite, back to a server on the ground, back to the satellite, back to the client would have a minimum round-trip latency of half a second or so, making the connection useless for any latency-sensitive application.
Satellites in low orbit solve the latency problem, but since they have a much narrower field of view they also provide worse individual coverage. Thus, useful (low-latency) satellite Internet really does require large constellations.
That last Starship launch showed that their site is not big enough to handle rockets the size of Super Heavy. I find it hard to believe they’ll be permitted to do it again.
Which tells you how much Elon is doomed to fail. There will be even less buy in to whatever he does.
I have a super app, it's my browser. I do not want to live in a walled garden, controlled by an insecure manchild
One of the few people who are responding to the question with rational thought, instead of reacting with sensational and overly emotional replies. Thank you for that.
I think that he didn't actually intend to buy twitter. I think his plan was to offer, twitter would go "no thanks" and then he could say that "look guys I've tried but they said no" to his millions of fans and he could continue to complain. But then Twitter said "yeah ok go on then" and he tried his hardest to not actually buy twitter. Remember the court case (I think?) about him disputing the amount of bots on the platform in an attempt to not buy? That also failed to go to plan and now Elon's got a $44 billion hole in his pocket and a site that's on fire. He (probably) can't fix it but his ego and desire to be the chad alpha man means he's now riding this until the site fully crashes. So he's now trying to save money by reducing service costs, firing workers and the usual stuff. And he's still got a fixation with x.com because he thinks it's a cool letter.
And now here we are. He's trying to turn a dying social media into an everything app with like half the requisites and none of the knowledge required.
Edit: As @majromax says below, the plan was more likely to actually buy twitter and then he decided to back out either after he had seen what was going on internally (company on fire) or had otherwise changed his mind.
Were that the case, he could have played hardball during the contract-writing stage. Unfortunately, he was so eager to have the contract signed that he didn't perform pre-contract due diligence, which could have let him walk away for some of the same grounds (e.g. "bots") that he tried to use during the lawsuit stage.
His purchase of Twitter may have started as a joke and ended as a legal compulsion, but somewhere in the middle he was earnestly trying to own the thing.
No he was not. He was trying to play chicken and being an idiot about it.
He was upset with the board and trying to bully them into doing what he wanted by making them look bad. I would not be surprised if he just assumed he could lawyer his way out no matter what he said. He found out the hard way that doesn’t work when the other side is also stupid rich.
I do not think he ever seriously tried to buy Twitter. He did the equivalent of getting his bluff called and trying to back out.
I do ever so enjoy it when rich people accidentally try to legally bully other rich people, especially when they're corporate entities with dozens of lawyers.
It must be so infuriating to taste the red tape they love to throw at other people.
That's probably true. My recollection of the whole events kinda merge together in the way that everything post covid has been. I'll amend the comment with your inclusion.
I'd assume he has done all this for attention. Before the twitter purchase, he was more or less an annoying but easily ignorable rich little gremlin. After buying one of the world's largest social media platforms and placing himself in the center of it, it has been harder and harder to ignore him, and once you think now is when he will fade back into relative obscurity, bam, he does yet another thing that disrupts the way millions of users interact or do business. He more or less bought one of the worlds largest captive audiences, and even though some people are able to simply able to quit and leave, there are many who rely on the site for business, or have a severe addiction to the site who can't leave. This whole ordeal has been an interesting case style in how much can you put a user through before they leave a platform for good, and how much of the business and user base is a factor in keeping people active on the site.
Right, it’s a key observation that whenever he drops out of the news cycle he acts up again.
It is great for the Fedi because it means we get little pulses of refugees from Twitter every few weeks which gives us a growth tailwind but one we can manage.
I've always found these interesting. How many users can Facebook, or apple, or google get by just making something. How many users will stick around even as it's obviously crap.
I followed this whole thing waaaaaaaay too closely last year, having too much time on my hands at work lol. I don't think he ever wanted to buy Twitter outright. He was already in the midst of accumulating shares and apparently trying to get a seat on the board, and had already gotten in trouble for keeping the former on the dl. While the accumulation of shares seems to point to a chance to be on the board to influence the decisions at Twitter, I think the overarching and more immediate scheme was a pump-and-dump, which he is well known for; playing fanboys with declarations of what he moves he'll make with TSLA and various forms of crypto are shenanigans he's successfully pulled multiple times in the past, with little to no consequence. However, this time around he very quickly backed himself into a hole by making a 420 joke about the Twitter stock price he'd buy the company at, to pump up the value of what he already owned, and both the SEC and the board of Twitter came at him, in various ways (enforcement on the part of the former, essentially saying "if you don't follow through there are consequences this time", and the poison pill measure by the latter). Then, for some unfathomable reason he signed away his right to due diligence, which essentially locked him into ownership- that billion dollar fine to back out wasn't a legally accessible option after this. Since Twitter is incorporated in Delaware and the Delaware Court of Chancery does not fuck around with these things, he was essentially out of options, but tried his best to get out of the sale anyways. All the public flailing around about bots and such were his subsequent attempts to back out of the deal in any way he could think of, but the lawsuits quickly started to enforce the sale. His private text msgs were subject to discovery in these lawsuits, and you'll notice he capitulated to the sale preeeeetty quickly once they were at risk of coming to light.
So, to answer your question with a TL;DR- greed, stupidity and hubris. There's no evil master plan there, at all. It's a tale as old as time with rich idiots who have never faced consequences before. He's just failing upwards, again.
For the userbase.
Also, I'm a bit skeptical anything Elon does will dissuade a sizeable portion of the userbase to stop using it, considering the inertia and network effects, although I'd love to be proven wrong. As for the rebrand, my theory is he just wanted to use the domain x.com which he had lying around.
To be clear, he didn't want to buy twitter, he was trying to manipulate their stock price to make more money (like he's done countless times before with his own company stocks, dogecoin, etc), but is too much of a dumbass and actually signed the contract saying he would in fact, buy twitter. He then found out he couldn't back out of the deal like he planned. He's actually actively suing the Twitter law firm that forced him to go through with the sale now. (which will only lose him even more money)
The acquisition never made business sense but then so do most acquisitions where ego is the primary motive and not the usual acquisition reasons (growth, profitability, bottom line, etc.). The Babylon Bee and other events clearly suggested that Elon's primary reason was the threat to his own twitter account and limitations on the content he posted, his backers prodded along this narrative of "Let Elon acquire Twitter" and Elon promptly listened to his sycophants. I think there is a good chance that if Twitter's old guard (Parag Aggarwal, Vijaya Gadde, etc.) had let Elon some leeway, it probably wouldn't have come to all of this.
I commented this on HN earlier, but I'll share it here as well:
So yeah, I think Twitter left a sour taste in his mouth and he just wants to make it into something else, or at least different enough to not remind him of Twitter and the baggage it brings with.
Employees fired? Check.
Policies changed? Check.
Re-branding? Check.
Personality cult is a huge part of it. I saw someone yesterday defending Elon that I was kinda surprised to see defending him. The reason is they've drank the Elon kool-aid and are so severely steeped in it that they've convinced themselves that everything Elon does is genius/smart, and even if it appears bad, or evil, or anti-worker, or whatever, it's all just part of some genius master plan. They will twist their brain to ensure they cannot find any fault in the man. It's a scary level of delusion, honestly. They also think Elon is funny, which says a lot to me too, but in different ways.
The most plausible explanation I’ve heard is that he’s been wanting to do this for 25 years and now there’s no one who can tell him not to.
This thread lays out the story. An “everything” app called X was basically what he wanted to make PayPal in to back in the late 90s.
It’s probably more complicated than that, but it’s a good start.
As much as I love to think Musk took external money / was dared to shut up Twitter either to spin the 2024 elections or be able to control the narrative on wealthy peoples' shady doings, I genuinely think Musk got in over his head and he doesn't realize it.
I'll go with stupidity > malice in this case.
He has been riding high on that sweet dopamine feedback loop twitter provides for years, being told he is the greatest human being alive and can do/achieve everything. He craves the attention so much that he grandstanded himself into the stupid and initially completely showy offer to buy Twitter.
That doesn't mean of course that now he is in on the whole thing, he wont use the platform to suppress voices he doesn't like or is suggested to not like.
I thought he wanted to back out of the buyout but when everyone saw it was going to cost him $44 billion it was rather enthusiastically enforced on him.
If memory serves correct the sentiment of many was to do whatever would be worse for Elon.
Elon wants to buy Twitter? Prevent it.
Wait, it will cost him $44B and he wants to back out? Enforce it.
Now we deal with the consequences and he gets to do whatever he wants with Twitter's Lindy effect.
I always figured that he made the initial bid just to get access to user data to find out who his enemies on the platform were and who was behind the conspiracy to denounce him. When he found out it was simply a large amount of regular people that don't like him because he's an egotistical ass he did what most people like that do and threw a tantrum. Since he doesn't know how to not be an ass he's decided it must be the platform that was broken and now must be 'fixed'.
I saw a conspiracy theory on Twitter that he's tanking it on purpose to control the masses. Large protests and uprisings have been organized on Twitter in recent years. He and his rich cronie friends don't like it and know things are only getting worse. More uprisings and protests will be planned on Twitter. They can't have that, so they're tanking it so we have no centralized place to plan and discuss.
I thought it was an interesting theory to get people riled up.
"Unless you’re the melonhead billionaire..." looks like you answered your own question.
On a side note I'm going to start using "mellonhead" from now on thanks.
From one Dan to another, I encourage its use!
Dans forever!