Elon Musk Is Straight Up Not Having A Good Time
We are currently watching the fallout and desperation plays resulting from one of the world’s most expensive tantrums, and every second of it is pure toothsome schadenfreude. This past week, ownership of Twitter officially transferred to businessman Elon Musk to the tune of 44 billion dollars. Of course, no price is too much to pay for a company or property that you expect to only exhibit further growth and profit.
The problem is, Twitter doesn’t really seem to fit into that description, even less so now that Musk took out 13 billion in loans against Twitter itself as part of the purchase. Really, the business reasons for the transaction are thin at best and non-existent at worst. It mostly feels like, despite all claims to the contrary, the shitposters of Twitter were living so rent-free in Musk’s head that he ended up spending almost 50 billion dollars to evict them.
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He, of course, has trumpeted that this is all actually about free speech and fighting unnecessary censorship, despite the fact that for a tweet to actually get censored, you’d have to say something like “I am going to kill Joe Biden with a COVID gun.” Musk seems to be one of the weirdos whose idea of “free speech” is centered way too much around why white people can’t say the n-word, even at karaoke.
The 51-year-old self-described memelord had some fun the first few hours after the deal, posting facebook-level memes that echo someone unironically posting le troll face in the year 2022. He was basically trying to taunt his detractors on Twitter with a “U MAD BRO,” except that everyone was like “dude, you just spent 44 billion dollars to post this.” Then, in full view of everyone on a platform that enjoyed making fun of him BEFORE this happened, he proceeded to step on a series of poo-covered rakes.
He fired half the workforce of twitter without advance notice, triggering a labor suit, only to have to try to hire them back so they could actually explain how the site worked. He announced that verification would now be part of a monthly subscription service, only to get pissy like a petulant child when people explained they were not going to pay for that. Finally, with a spike of completely unmoderated content, advertisers began to pull out en masse, since they no longer had any guarantee that their ads about new Oreo flavors weren’t going to be sandwiched between memes about “shekels” from groyper accounts. Musk immediately blamed this on social justice warriors and claimed he was going to pursue a tortious interference claim against… the users of twitter? For boycotting a business? Which, of course, is concrete, definitive, protected free speech.
If the whole website blows up, it’ll be, on some level, sorely missed. For now, though, at least, let’s sit back and watch the fireworks implode.
