this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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That Twitter had essentially become accepted as an official source of communication and Elon's purchase of Twitter so near to the time that he was experimenting with his ability to perform market manipulation on his own companies using Twitter, those things combined made me assume a large part of his reason for purchasing Twitter was to see how far he could take market manipulation and if he could influence other companies. In my darkest version of this scenario, I think Elon was just testing how far his reach is.
Maybe the verified checkmark debacle really was created by incompetence and Twitter tried quickly to fix it, or maybe it was a nefarious way to undermine legitimacy and cause a multi-billion dollar blip on the stock market. Either way, I could easily imagine Musk telling politicians and CEOs after that, "look at what I was able to do just by moving a single finger. Now imagine what I could do to you if I really wanted to."
I really like the razors, here Hanlon's razor is relevant:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I'm sure Elon has no grand plan behind any of this, just a chain of impulsive actions.
Well put. He's been too busy sniffing his own farts. He's out of touch with reality, as most ultra rich people are.
Little wonder what he is trying to turn Twitter into with X. He's tried it several times with several other companies, all of which either failed or ejected him.
He's even tried it with the "X" name more than once.
He is impulsively trying to manifest this idea of something into existence despite the fact that it repeatedly fails. Because the idea just isn't good.
He wants to make the western equivalent of WeChat, when a good amount of the functionality is already hadled by Whatsapp in Europe and non-Sino Asia, and Americans are pretty resistant to the idea domestically. He failed the moment he politicized it. Hell, he failed before he even bought it because Twitter has always been a narcissistic den of toxicity--Tumblr, all grown up. There's a reason that Jack created a Twitter clone under a different company with different everything while CEO of Twitter. It was a sinking ship, and Elon was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he thinks he really is something special.
Oh, the conspiracy side of the story is just to sound saucy. I don't think these were calculated moves, but I still wouldn't be surprised if he tried to profit from his incompetence by labeling it as a flex to those he wants to control. Like, a dumbass who accidentally shoots their own foot and then shouts, "yeah bitch! And that's MY foot! You think I won't cap you too?!"
This assumes all other things are equal.
Elon musk and Donald Trump and others are not stupid. They may act stupid. Their brains may be psychologically damaged by the distance their money allows them to put between themselves, others, and the consequences of their actions.
But they are not stupid. If they were stupid, their stupidity would sometimes bite them in the ass in a way that actually has consequences for them. Since that does not happen, we can be relatively certain that their actions are going according to plan...their plan? Maybe. Or their accountant's plan. But until a mistake costs them actual money that they cannot recoup through tax shenanigans, I find it hard to accept that they aren't just evil.