Twitter now feels like when I wake up any morning to find the entire site burned to the ground, Elon Musk standing on a cigarette butt, yellow face, sipping bathtub gin through broken teeth, grinning at me.
— John Birmingham (@Johnbirmingham) October 31, 2022
It seems that many people are not happy to pay Elon Musk for the right to use Twitter.
Judging by the billionaire’s tweets since he paid $44 billion to buy the platform, this seems surprising and may point to a potential flaw in his original business plan.
A great success, if there was a business plan, involved paying the entire $44 billion down the drain – and then including the Nazis.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter appears to be his own special military operation in Ukraine. It seemed like a good idea at the time, especially among the extreme online right wing, but the Air Force has been shot out of the sky, the swim team has sunk, and now strangers on the Internet are tweeting bad things about it.
He’s a fool, isn’t he? pic.twitter.com/ItEpbsfw72
— David Milner (@DaveMilbo) November 2, 2022
A person has a completely normal day. 😄 https://t.co/UsVjlFA5lS
– Alan Baxter 💀📖👊🥃 (@AlanBaxter) November 2, 2022
Ironically, if he were willing to offer a service that wasn’t loaded with Nazis, sex, and textual harassment, millions of people might consider shelling out a couple bucks a month to share their thoughts on sandwiches and pictures. With their dogs like this.
Difficult day? This can help. pic.twitter.com/QUABK7s7lT
— John Birmingham (@Johnbirmingham) November 1, 2022
Unfortunately, Musk can’t seem to identify with his new role as the sole owner of a forty-four billion dollar bug.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Things move fast online, but in the hyper-accelerated space of Twitter, it was helluva speed from Musk’s promise to advertisers that he wasn’t going to make a free-for-all hell appearance about the batshit crazy homo-lovers who tried to kill Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer. -Tiff Conspiracy Theory Created by Tweet.
Before Musk pulled the tweet, advertisers who had little reason to spend their marketing dollars on Bird’s site were pulling their ad buys. But of course, deleting the stupid tweet only served to infuriate the batshit crazy conspiracy theorists and Nazi-enthusiastic Incel types who flooded the site after Musk took over.
He needs those advertisers.
Interest on the company’s debt now tops more than $1 billion a year, but Twitter paid off more than half of that money last fiscal year. Musk can’t afford to fire advertisers as Stephen King refuses to step in, playing on the free-speech crusader.
$20 a month to keep my blue check? Please they have to pay. If that starts, I’m gone like Enron.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 31, 2022
Musk made me think of Tom Sawyer, who was given the job of whitewashing the penalty fence. Tom gets his friends to do the work for him and pay him for the privilege. That’s what Musk wants to do on Twitter. No, no, no.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) November 3, 2022
Of course it gets worse, because everything works.
The billion-plus interest that Twitter can’t fully repay is just the beginning of Musk’s financial woes. Even if he lays off half the staff in the next twenty-four hours, it seems…
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It still has to run a globally distributed communications platform for the rest of the payroll, rent for corporate offices and other expenses.
Good luck with that, genius.
Hell can turn the company. It may even charge users to run their accounts. All users too, not just Blue Check elites.
If he’s willing to piss off his fans and make most people feel safe and welcome there… well, to be honest about it, with f*ckwits like Musk, he’d probably charge everyone five bucks a month.
If it’s willing to crack down on bots and trolls and misinformation, Twitter can become what it first promised, a town square for the digital age.
But if you really want a free-for-all and a hellscape, that’s impossible because whatever the reason, that appeals to your sense of the Lord.
- This post originally appeared on John Birmingham’s Alien Sideboob. You can read the original here. He is TLike a weed @JohnBirmingham
