The way of an eagle in the
sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the
way of a man with a young woman, and the way of Elon Musk with Twitter are high
and low mysteries - the last of them falls under the mystery of the confidence
man in American history and lore. I have changed my mind about the Musk and
twitter thing. I thought it would be a disaster, and I still think so, but it
will also be a free comic spectacle as well. Musk's 44 billion dollar purchase
can be justified, financially, in two ways - either Twitter stock goes up
tremendously, or he finds, down the daisy chain, a greater fool, a crypto
pseudo billionaire as high on coke as, uh, it is rumored, the purchaser is.
In this economy, that isn't
going to happen. So what will happen? Here's where the comedy starts. Musk has
decided he is a deep philosophical type, and so I could see him opening twitter
to the army of Trump. But what I can't see is the advertisers who are twitters
source of real funding going for this demographic. Switching from Disney
channel (communist and gay!) to Depends Underpants (blessed by Fox) is not
gonna pay the bills. Of course, a lot depends on whether some hungry corp sees
the possible steal here. Say Instagram develops a bloc note service that
essentially copies twitter, with a few bows to IP rights.
Given Musk's history of
getting away with larceny, even if he comes out poorer, I can't imagine he will
lose his shirt. Leave that to his cult members. Anyway, as a regular twitter
person, I'm experiencing that wonderful thing - free contempt and joy. Usually
you pay for your contempt - karma is real - but in this case the universe is
offering a free raree show, so why not take a ticket?
No comments:
Post a Comment