What If Killing Twitter Was The Point?

It makes sense.

Photo by Akshar Dave🌻 on Unsplash

I have a maxim for you:

If you don’t want to believe something, it’s probably true.

That’s where I’m at with Twitter right now. Elon Musk recently said the company might have to file for bankruptcy. It’s not going well. After a round of sloppy layoffs, high-level executives are quitting. Basic functions are starting to degrade, because they don’t have enough coders.

On the surface, it looks like Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s making rookie mistakes. That’s undeniably true. Anyone who can read knows that Musk is a terrible boss, with a long history of firing and/or alienating the people he depends on, simply because he likes being cruel.

Maybe that was the point.

Maybe Elon Musk was supposed to buy Twitter and drive it straight into the ground. Maybe none of this was an accident.

I don’t want to believe it, but this explanation makes sense.

It’s not so crazy.

Think about Twitter for a minute. What is it? It’s a platform that allows ordinary people to share information with each other. They can share information about dangerous diseases. They can share information about climate change. They can share information about labor unions and strikes.

Now think about the super rich. What do they want? They want a population of semi-educated, ignorant consumers who do nothing but work all the time and then watch dance videos on their time off. They want everyone to scroll their favorite celebrity’s beach photos while quietly hating themselves.

That’s how they make money.

Super rich people like Elon Musk don’t want a platform where some ordinary person has the same voice and influence they do.

They hate that idea.

So that leaves two options. If you’re super rich, then you can try to turn Twitter into your own tool, or you can break it. That’s the same logic of a mean kid, by the way. If you can’t have a toy, then nobody can. They’d rather everyone lose something than one person gain an advantage.

More on that in a minute…

Now:

We know Elon’s rich friends put him up to buying Twitter. They egged him on. Those friends include Peter Thiel, a billionaire who’s literally trying to build an underground doomsday bunker in New Zealand.

We also know that Elon didn’t buy Twitter with his own money. He had backing from investors like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, a billionaire from Saudi Arabia and the first Saudi king’s grandson. Multiple politicians and intelligence experts have said this poses a national security risk.

Alwaleed was arrested in 2017 for bribery and extortion.

So, he’s not a nice guy.

He’s no friend of democracy.

This is the kind of company Elon keeps. He hangs out with other shady billionaires who seem to want to take over the world.

Maybe the world’s shady billionaires decided they don’t like Twitter so much. Sure, it makes money. It sells ads. It’s also a hotbed of liberal activism. Workers have used it to organize labor unions. Epidemiologists and Covid survivors have used it to challenge the narrative that the pandemic is “over.” Climate scientists are using it to share accurate information about our pending extinction.

In short, Twitter has been a thorn.

Destroying Twitter probably wasn’t Plan A. No, Plan A was to capture it for fascists and turn it into a tool for spreading hate under the disguise of “free speech.” That plan isn’t going so well. Just like every evil control freak with fantasies of world domination, there’s always a backup plan.

Always.

It looks like Elon’s backup plan is to bankrupt Twitter. If he can’t scare off all the liberals, all the unions, all the climate activists, then he’s going to destroy it. Nobody will be able to use Twitter anymore.

Who does that hurt more?

It hurts us.

Sure, it’ll embarrass Elon Musk. It won’t necessarily ruin him, though, not if he can play the country’s financial laws to his favor. He’s been doing that his entire life. It’s probably the only thing he’s good at it.

When you think about it, bankrupting Twitter is actually kinda brilliant if a bunch of other billionaires are going to bail you out.

It’s a smart play.

It’s incredibly Machiavellian.

Think about the real story here. Elon Musk is still worth nearly $200 billion. He’s using other people’s money to play with one of the world’s most important venues of public discourse.

Breaking it won’t hurt him at all.

Elon Musk could set all of his companies on fire right now, sell his stocks, and then live comfortably for the rest of his life on a private island. There’s literally one reason he hasn’t done that yet.

He would get bored.

Elon Musk isn’t doing any of this for the money. In his own perverse way, he finds all of this highly entertaining.

He’s having a blast. He’s having fun in the only way that miserable rich white guys can have fun, by making other people miserable.

He loves this.

Say what you will about Twitter. Sure, you can spend too much time on there fighting with trolls. It can mess with your mental health. On the other hand, millions of decent human beings use Twitter to share information and organize. They use Twitter to build support networks. This app has helped a lot of us stay informed outside the loop of traditional mainstream media.

If Elon does manage to destroy Twitter, it’ll be missed. It’s not easy to create and maintain a network like that.

It requires huge resources.

Killing Twitter doesn’t really hurt corporations. They can always advertise somewhere else. It’s going to be harder to recreate the networks that activists and journalists use to fight for the planet, and human rights.

It’s not hopeless.

If Twitter dies, other platforms can rise up in its place. There’s Mastodon. If I were you, I wouldn’t leave Twitter just yet, but I’d definitely be getting on these other platforms. We need to be ready. Things are happening fast. I’m not sure anyone can predict exactly what’s going to happen with Twitter. Elon Musk himself isn’t acting like a very stable guy right now.

Killing Twitter won’t hurt him.

He’s secretly enjoying it.