I think the simple explanation seems to be that he vastly overpaid for it, tried his best to get out of buying, and now that he has sunk all this money into it, he is trying all quickfire ways of making money via Twitter (most of which seem ridiculously bad but I doubt there are many good options for making good money via Twitter).
Elon isn't <i>trying</i> to destroy Twitter. It looks like he is making impulsive, uninformed decisions... Kinda like a Twitter user shooting off Tweets.<p>Therefore it's hard to say how fast the ship is sinking, if at all. He could make a brillant change tomorrow, then do something horrific 80 seconds later, and who knows what the net effect would be.
Yes. The only real question is whether he's trying to or it's just happening anyway.<p>When your competitor is Mark Zuckerberg and he can moot an alternative with the sole USP being "sanely run", and this sounds like a positive development, you know value is being destroyed.<p>But this was predictable way back, including for instance the Thai cave rescue, where his suggestion being shot down led him to make unwarranted, vile personal attacks.<p>Elon Musk comes across as a malignant narcissist. Twitter is his narcissistic supply. It is going as well as anyone remotely informed would have predicted.<p>He could have got out of this for a couple of billion dollars, a telling off, and a small hit to his credibility with backers. But no. He has had his thin skin exposed, and everything avoidable that has happened since is the inevitable consequence of him lashing out while decompensating.
Interesting philosophical question: if a man buys a burning dumpster and then, giggling madly, proceeds to throw in several sticks of dynamite caked, for truly inexplicable reasons, in his own feces, can he really be said to have destroyed it, or has he merely, if perhaps prematurely, put it out of the world’s collective misery?
The site is totally unusable right now unless you're a paid subscriber, in which case it's only very slightly less unusable - so by definition I'd say yeah, Twitter as we knew it has been destroyed. Whether Elon intends to backpedal in the next 12-24 hours as seems to be his MO remains to be seen.
SpaceX and Tesla had adults in the room. How much they steered Elon vs he steered them can be debated.<p>Twitter has no adults in the room. He can’t help but destroy it.
Start with the fact that he didn't want to buy it. He probably thought he could acquire it, make some changes, and flip it for less than a settlement would have cost. That didn't work out. If you're wondering if there's a plan, the plan didn't work, and now there is no plan. It's the special military operation of LBOs.
What I'M more afraid is that we will be under ZUCK control totally. He is going to create a massive inter application growth for his new application. I'm really worried about twitter as well
He's definitely destroying Twitter as we knew it. Whether something new will come from it remains to be seen. I wouldn't hold my breath, but I'm not going to claim to be psychic.
Nope.<p>We're just watching the over-reaction here once again screaming at another Twitter speed bump magnified by the techies.<p>Just like the other speed bumps before, this will be yet another nothing.
No, he's transforming it into a different service while getting value from the existing userbase. It's a way to make a popular tech company without relying on sheer luck that it gets a critical mass of users.
Just experimentation. He bought the company at the top of the market and has a large debt bill, likely that is all there is to the frequent changes.<p>It's obvious that existing users will find this unsettling.
It's the revolving butthurt filters on every site with simulated user discourse (including HN). There is no such thing as a "dangerous idea" or "malinformation." But, what remains after all the thoughtcrime is censored out is just plain propaganda.
Nope. The (people aka) users, who are ... most educated, most intelligent and, ... most followed, are destroying twitter.<p>In somewhat more comprehensible terms: ... the golden calves are destroying twitter, not the guy who bought the thing from the guy who had no fucking idea what he was doing until someone told him ... (aka ... the dog).