this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Your position is that a wealthy man deliberately burned 22 billion dollars to destroy microblogging? That he's intelligent enough to plan and execute this perfectly, but too dumb to think of a better way to spend 22 billion on himself?
I think this theory falls apart on examination, to say nothing of Occam's Razor which argues heavily in favor of sheer incompetence.
This paints Elon like a calculated intellectual that carefully weighs his decisions and has a great team around him. When in reality, he’s a petulant, ego maniac that is far more swayed by his mercurial emotions than reason and intellect. His many prepubescent tantrums over the years is evidence of that.
Money doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t make you a genius because you used your status to con someone out of it. If you don’t know how the tech works, Elon sounds like a fucking genius. A visionary. But if you are in the field, you’ll realize that his promises (living on Mars, brain chips, etc.) are just fiction.
I'm not sure from the tone of your post whether you are trying to agree or disagree with my conclusion because it reads slightly argumentative, but I assure you I agree with you 100% and think this supports my point perfectly so maybe I'm misreading the tone. I upvoted you either way for being right in your points whether you come to the same conclusion as me or not.
He burned 22 billion because he was forced to after being a doofus. He is not destroying microblogging, he is destroying the environment around microblogging on his platform. It is his new toy that was never worth what he paid for it, so there is little point (to him) in trying to recoup monetary value. It’s value is to him is being his personal playground.
This wouldn't be the first time it happened: Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
Obviously, to ruin the world and complete his turn into a Bond villain, he needed to tank the 5th most popular social media site, which has been proven over and over to have less influence than anyone thinks.
The most obvious explanation to me is that following so much success running pump and dump scams on his followers in some stocks but mostly unregulated crypto, he decided he was untouchable. Then tried to run another such scheme on twitter stock, but this time threw in a legally binding contract into the manipulation because he's too dumb to realise how dumb he is.
He got so used to fucking around, he thought he'd never have to find out...