Saturday, October 15, 2022

The Elon Musk raree show

 

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?

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