Probably one of the worst investment decisions (outside of cryptocurrency) that I’m aware of. 40 billion dollars for a platform with such negligible reach and even lower potential for monetization?
On the other hand… If he can run Twitter into the ground I think he’ll be doing the world a service.
Do not misunderstand why he is doing this. He is doing this because (as anyone with even a partial understanding of the law would understand) is that the Delaware court case was going very very badly for him, and he did not want to be subject to discovery.
You're talking about the wrong "this". I think you're right, and that's why he went through with the purchase instead of fighting the lawsuit, but he was only facing that lawsuit because he moved to buy it in the first place. He didn't accidentally sign a bunch of paperwork to buy a company for $40bn, he at some point made a bunch of deliberate decisions.
I'm not the one you asked, but it depends on your interests. It could also depend on what you're not willing to tolerate as defederation plays some role in what you will see.
You want to fire up a Mastodon server because I presume you're concerned with the loss of free speech on that platform? Do you think it was free prior to Elon's acquisition? Or are you only concerned about one particular type of speech when it comes to free speech?
> 40 billion dollars for a platform with such negligible reach...
It might have "negligible reach" amongst the general population, but it does seem to have an extraordinary amount of cultural power. Whatever upside there is, it seems like it's more like the one you get from bankrolling political candidates and paying to disseminate ideological propaganda.
100%. It may or may not sell products, be good for ads. Those engagements might not be ideal, for those stakeholders-bearing-checkbooks.
But it is by orders of magnitude highest radix connector of humanity we have. I've probably clicked fav on a million different people's tweets, I've probably written messages to tens of thousands of different people I've never met. I've seen multiple sides of millions of topics & synthesized my own opinion.
Nothing comes remotely close. Highest human engagement platform of all time.
Yeah, all the banks have made a pretty poor decision.
Unclear if Musk himself will lose any money once all "investors" pitch in. His change of tone in the past few weeks gives a hint on who would actually be funding this.
Heard this many times since the whole Musk/twitter thing started, yet no one actually comes up with any action he did.
Especially on twitter itself its a very common "argument", usually followed by the burden of proof fallacy calming that it is "common knowledge" and its up to me to research if I dont already know the free speech "wrongdoings" of Musk.
There is apparently already a narrative war between NYT and WP(owned by Bezos) and Twitter(owned by Elon) if you look at recent replies by Elon to other people [1]
That's correct. It's a bit of a meme on twitter where someone will make some statement, then that phrase. Eg "20k seagulls die every day from choking on keurig pods. Let that sink in." Musk is parodying that with a physical sink.
I'm looking forward to all the celebrity grandstanding about how they are leaving twitter and joining network X before crawling back to their accounts a week later to get another dopamine hit from the retweet and like counts.
This decision is particularly bizarre decision considering it sets back his bailiwick of a multi planetary human species, probably the most expensive endeavor any can undertake.
In his pique he wasted 44 billion on Twitter, ostensibly to protect free speech of conservatives --people who don't even care about free speech.
Its like destroying your TV when your favorite sports team is losing.
I haven't had that experience. Literally any tweet I've seen that has more than five comments has at least one toxic comment (or just some insane barely-related crypto rant).
Reddit, by comparison, has subreddits that are heavily modded and have no toxic comments at all. There is no heavily modded part of Twitter, unless I suppose you use it as a private social network and everyone you interact with is set to private.
Remember when the "mobile version" was just SMS? It was fun back then.
Fun fact: A couple of years ago, I wanted to see some of those first tweets I made over SMS, and they were gone. My guess is that they had major data loss at one point, and just never told anyone.
I keep my feed reverse-chronological (and avoid their "home" feed), and the worst thing I see in my feed is people complaining about all the rage bait. Their algorithmic feed tries to put "engaging" content in your face, but it's so easy to avoid that it honestly seems negligent that most people don't bother with the two clicks it'd take to make the change.
Yes it'd be better if that stuff didn't exist, but it's hardly as bad as other sites' feeds.
Because Twitter was a novelty back then my proposal made national headlines on TV and newspapers. My cousin in another state found out about it by seeing it on the national morning news. It was wild.
Even when Twitter was fighting for free speech in 2021 in India, Musk was on the opposite side saying that India is Twitter's third largest market, and it should follow government instructions. In 2022 Twitter challenged the Indian government with a lawsuit, and Musk called Twitter out.
Musk also fully endorsed EU's Digital Services Act, an internet regulation plan that Twitter opposed, calling it an attack on free expressions and human rights.
I am still not sure what he really plans to accomplish,as it really isn't going to have any meaningful impact to improving anyone's lives except maybe online discourse on Twitter will be potentially more right wing than left wing (just like every other social media platform) with the purchase of Twitter.
