Listen to the Rain

Title from this famous twitter thread.

I've been watching Elon Musk thrash around like a bull in a china shop for a week now, from making himself king of twitter to deciding on the price for Twitter verfication by haggling with Stephen King to firing half the company (possibly by stack-ranking, which is mind-boggling) to blocking the president of MMA Global. They rolled out the new paid-for blue check and it didn't work, and then they got it working but said that they were going to implement a NEW "verified" display that does what the old blue check used to, and then it showed up on people's profile for a few hours and then disappeared, and then:



Okay, so Musk is the king of Twitter and just makes snap decisions and makes his staff--which he's reduced by half, mind--try to implement them. But then:



This seems like madness but it is actually part of a plan. Musk wants to turn Twitter into WeChat, the Chinese app that combines social media, messaging, and banking. The difference is that WeChat is backed by the Chinese government--and whatever you think of the CCP, they are an actual government with experience in governing--and Twitter is run by King Elon who randomly changes his mind multiple times a week. Do you want to trust him with your money? I don't. I don't even want to trust him with $8 a month, nor even the miniscule amount of money advertisers make on me, which is why I use an old version of Tweetbot where the timeline is chronological and I don't see any ads or promoted tweets at all. What people want out of a bank is stability and constancy--that when they go to take their money out, their money will be there. If Twitter gets FDIC insured as a bank, then they'll probably end up costing the government a lot of money. If they don't, they'll cost a lot of crypto bros their money.

Basically, what this is revealing is that Musk's real skill, the thing he is legitimately great at, is securing government contracts. This is a valuable skill! But it's not the same as engineering or financial genius.

Edit: Ahahaha maybe Musk fired everyone who remembered that Twitter is under an FTC consent decree and now they might be up for fines. Facebook was fined billions, how about Twitter?

If Musk were deliberately trying to destroy Twitter, what would he have done differently?