It astounds me that so many rich people seem to think that they have a right to other people's money; that someone choosing not to do business with them is akin to a moral offense.
How many? I think I've literally only ever heard Musk complain about this; generally, this is something that rich people, and people in general, understand.
I was hoping that this article would argue that Elon's destruction of Twitter would be good for society, that better alternatives will come from the ashes
What was the alternative? Twitter lost money from the start and it seemed like they had no plan on how to be profitable. If Musk had not bought it, I bet it would have been bought to be sold for parts and slowly disappeared as the parts were sold. It wouldn't have surprised me that the alternative owners would have done anything to produce a profit. Musk is a problem but at least he does not have to do ANY thing to it so it produces a profit. The problem is that we, the whole world, have a hard time getting along. Hopefully, if X survives we can use it to find a middle ground were we all can at least tolerate each other.
Getting rid of Twitter does nothing. Microblogging is a fundamental function of the web. It will reappear and reappear if it's destroyed but there's no guarantee that it will be any better.
This is a really odd recurring meme. To be clear, pre-acquisition Twitter had positive free cash flow from 2016 to 2020, before falling negative due to a one-off legal settlement in 2021. It was also net profitable for some of that period. It had significant ability to raise funds if required, and a fair bit of opportunity to cut costs. There was no real prospect of it going out of business.
> What was the alternative? Twitter lost money from the start and it seemed like they had no plan on how to be profitable.
This seems like a strange idea, considering they were profitable in some years. Sure, they had losses afterwards, but those were more related to legal penalties they had to pay - the company itself was right on track to profitability when Musk bought it.
