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Blob's avatar

I really do think all the Elon/Twitter stuff is best understood as a lark: "Wouldn't it be crazy if I bought a bunch of Twitter stock?" It's always helpful to understand Elon as fundamentally a Reddit guy, and for him buying 9.2% of Twitter and then tweeting a bunch of dumb shit about Twitter and then eventually buying the whole thing is the billionaire version of ordering a left-meat-only pizza. At the end of the day he's a guy messing around with an online system to see if he can get any funny posts out of it.

There was an old tweet I can't find that went something like "It's wild how I can just type something in this box that will absolutely ruin my life." This is obviously not the case for Elon, but I do think it points to the idea that Elon's experience of the Twitter product is unique from every other user's (with the exception of maybe Donald Trump.)

When Elon types things in the box, stuff happens in the real world. Sometimes that stuff is predictable (crypto prices go up or down), other times it is less expected (he gets to host SNL?) That seems like a fun game, and I think you can view a lot of his pre-stock purchase Twitter behavior over the past six months as being in line with how a speed-runner might operate, experimenting what he can type in the box to see if he can make the game do something interesting or unexpected. To carry this metaphor further, buying a bunch of stock, pretending to take a board seat and then purchasing the company is something like modding: growing bored of testing the boundaries of the vanilla game, he's now playing with how that game works if he starts messing around with the system files. So far a bunch of really interesting stuff (to him, anyway) has happened!

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Justin Charity's avatar

he fixes twitter? great! he kills twitter? great! nothing much changes but every other journalist i love and/or respect still finally talks themselves into writing that unreadable but nonetheless appreciated "why i'm finally leaving twitter" personal essay and following through? great! i support this transaction!!

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