this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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You seem to be taking pleasure in it, but the fact is this was the plan from the moment he was locked into the purchase. Buy the business, run it into the ground, destroy the platform that people use to organise on. On the way down, try a bunch of shady shit and see what they can get away with - this will be the new standard for any platform that comes next.
That's been the outcome, but I think you're dramatically overestimating Musk if you think that was his intent.
It seems clear to me that he's of below average intelligence with an overinflated, incredibly fragile ego.
It wasn't his intent when he posted about wanting to buy the company, but after the SEC forced him to buy, and once he formed a coalition to buy it, the plan became to kill the business off with a leveraged buyout.
Make no mistake, Twitter isn't dying because of Musk's mismanagement, it's dying because it was saddled with $13bn of debt that it could never have hoped to pay back. The mismanagement is just a show to provide deniability.
That isn't to say that Musk is some kind of genius, just that he's a clown playing his role.
How is Musk going to profit from running Twitter into the ground? I think I did not understand that part.
He isn't. However, you can still make something from a loss - such as establishing new standards of what social media websites can get away with.
Everyone is downvoting as if this is a baseless conspiracy and ridiculous.
For those people, here's a source
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490
And an excerpt;
On the day that public records revealed that Elon Musk had become Twitter’s biggest shareholder, an unknown sender texted the billionaire and recommended an article imploring him to acquire the social network outright.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.
The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination.
But...how does NBC News have texts that Musk received...?
Edit: Revealed in a court filing.
See relevant text:
God damn but that gun is smoking like Australia in a heatwave.
That is one explanation, but imho a more likely explanation in the spirit of Hanlon's razor is that he receives 100s of crazy texts like this on a daily basis and one of them just happens to somewhat align with what crazy shit he is doing now.
You should read the article. It details how Musk followed the text's suggestions exactly, and is aligning himself closely with the same far right neo-nazis that begged him to buy Twitter and deplatform it.
Even if that exact text didn't convince him, one of the well known far right political pundits has definitely tried. Free speech is like their worst enemy, they can't let Twitter be open to all that free information.