After Axing Headlines, Elon Musk To Hide Retweet, Like Buttons On Twitter

I think initially, he just wanted to do his duty as a right-wing reactionary and use his influence to shame Twitter for deplatforming white supremacists, likely having heard that Truth Social was eying up a plot next to every other dead social network that pandered to fascists.

But like every other figurehead of that crowd, below the bluster and bravado lies a very tiny dick and his preferred method of wearing shorts in the shower is spending millions of dollars in an effort to convince everyone he is the smartest man in the world.

So pretentious screeds about "free speech absolutism" quickly turned into self-aggrandizing posts about how he could do it better and before he even got a chance to call someone a pedo, he'd accidentally made some comments about buying Twitter that he was legally obligated to follow through on.

He tried to squirm out of it for a while, muttering about bots and whatnots, but it seems his lawyers informed him that yes, he had also bragged away his opportunity to back out and he was going to have to follow through.

And so a couple of months later, he walked into a mostly empty office with 4 goals in mind.

First, he needed to get far-right propaganda back on track. Too many people had started to see through the "we're not neo-nazis we just have the opinions, goals and pundits", plausible deniability schtick and the far-right funnel just wasn't flowing how it used to before all the domestic terrorism.

That kicked off a flurry of actions like unbanning mentally ill hip-hop artists, internationally embarrassing politicians and pseudo-intellectuals who'd spent decades striving to achieve mediocrity before they said something bigoted and were immediately placed on a pedestal.

Second, he needed to self-soothe after doing something so stupid in front of so many people. $44 billion dollars down the drain! That's not what the smartest man in the world would do! Especially not if money was the only thing that made him noteworthy in the first place.

So he marched around unplugging things and pretending he knew what he was talking about and wasn't just lifting key phrases from more intelligent people like a celebrity parrot.

It was an unconvincing show for anyone in the industry who quickly realised he barely had a junior-level understanding of a single moving part, let alone the hundreds that keep a site like Twitter online.

Third, he needed to claw back every penny he could, carefully balancing things like "gleefully firing all the heartbroken staff" with other important business like "indulging his teenage edgelord".

But each new idea is even more dogshit than the last. He bought a sinking ship and he's trying to bail out the water with every piece of cutlery in the kitchen. It's only a matter of time before the office supplies turn up on ebay.

And fourth and, probably most importantly: "Are there any women in this place worth manipulating into prostitution? I need everybody back in the office tomorrow for a face to face"

I mean there's communication between Musk and right wing figures before the sale about driving all the blue checks off and devaluating the company which we know about because the messages and communications were released in the court battle

The only reason why I'm not so keen on the conspiracy, is that it doesn't make sense to me that someone so wealthy would have to stake this destruction on his own reputation and take collateral losses on his other business if he was being machiavellian about it. He could tell his puppet CEO to take all those destructive measures and still maintain his tech genius image. It just seems more like a wild ego thing.

But the people who funded his acquisition, this obvious hare-brained idea, maybe they were aiming for its destruction. They should have known that he was paying far more than the website was worth and that its income would never repay it.

At this point, he’s obviously just trolling an idiot.

He shouldjusyt shut it down at this point

You're not going to argue them out of Twitter. If they're still there, it's not for rational reasons. It's because of nostalgia, or because they're part of communities that are stuck facing the Fiddler on the Roof problem.

Shaming them for staying isn't going to work, either. We need to make a space for them to move to, not away from, and, frankly, the Fediverse just isn't that right now.

Literally making Twitter more tolerable every time he locks some feature behind logins/paywalls.

To be fair, the only thing I ever used it for was emergency reporting.

If he scales it back so that the only free and public feature is tweets of 250 characters or less, I may actually visit it again. Assuming my ad blocker works.

He can always not pay the bank who actually paid for Twitter. It is already worth less than his debt.

I do appreciate how he and Spez seem to do things that annoy only a fraction of their users at a time; it allows the Fediverse to adapt to the incoming waves of users before the next wave hits.

For his next trick, he’ll be removing the works….

Every single person who actively used Twitter?

Wtf kind of comment is this supposed to be?