If anything, it’s gone just about as stupidly as one could imagine. That might be a good way of predicting the course Phony Stark will take, much like his political equivalent: assume the stupidest possible outcome commensurate with the facts.
Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, accomplished at great expense, has resulted in massive personnel losses that have exposed him to technical debt and legal liability in multiple companies. His decisions on who should be allowed on the platform – coupled with his own 14-year-old brain – have caused advertisers to flee in their droves, while the Usual Suspects chortle and lavish praise on their ham-faced god. Things have not utterly collapsed, but there is a sense that the whole thing is held together with bailing wire and bubble gum and that it would only take one mighty blow to cripple everything.
And there are many directions it could come from. EU regulation. US copyright law. Criminal investigation of the financing in search of foreign influence. Or Apple could just decide that the risk is too great and kick it off the App Store, much as they failed to do with Uber when they had the ability to kill a dickhead VC baby and failed. It’s a good thing everyone’s TWTR was bought out on generous terms, because one can only imagine it would be sinking like TSLA.
Oh by the way – the CEO of Twitter is ostensibly the CEO of Tesla, which has hemorrhaged literally tens of billions of dollars of market cap. He is also the CEO of SpaceX, a company that has the federal government as its primary customer. Neither is a business that will do better for having a mercurial adolescent as CEO – although the consolation might be that Twitter is enough of a honeypot that Musk might leave SpaceX to Gwynne Shotwell’s leadership in all but name (which many commenters think has already happened) and let someone else do the boring work at Tesla (which many commentators have clamored after for years).
Elon Musk is not a genius. He is not even particularly bright. He is a fortunate investor who is good at playing a credulous media like a fiddle, and who is aspirational to the armies of the mentally and emotionally defective created by indifferent parenting, unlimited internet access, and absolutely no paradigm for what it means to be a man in the 21st century. And Twitter is now their shit-flinging playground. It’s not going to be a place worth sticking around.
The moral of the story is that anyone who has money enough to buy Twitter isn’t paying enough taxes. It would be remarkable what would be possible in this country with confiscatory levies on unearned wealth.