(2022-04-26) Read Elon Musk Won't Fix Twitter, but He Won't Kill It Either

Max Read: Elon Musk won't fix Twitter (but he won't kill it, either). It has a core of extraordinarily dedicated users, who spend hours a day creating and sharing content for the site, and yet many of those users would agree that the product is broken and the experience of using Twitter sucks ass. (Musk Buys Twitter)

it somehow swallowed a number of industries to the point where it has become not just the meeting place but the entire professional context for most journalists, political strategists, venture investors and kpop fans.

Now Elon Musk seems likely to own Twitter, and the overwhelming feeling is that Twitter is about to become either less bad, or much worse, depending on who you are and what you care about

I want to propose a third possibility, which is that Musk will not implement any significant changes, and in fact will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all.

one reason that many commentators believe Musk is buying Twitter to "fix" its commitment to "free speech" is that he has said more or less that. What I am proposing here is that he is full of shit.

the one person for whom it is definitively not broken, the one person for whom Twitter is patently obviously not poorly designed or run, is Elon Musk.

No one has made more money from Twitter than Elon Musk over the last two years, not even Twitter's management or biggest shareholders.

Twitter is, in the Goldilocks zone sense, just right for Elon: large enough to be important but small enough to still feel intimate; elite enough to be influential but casual enough to be manipulable; freewheeling enough to tolerate trolling but moderated enough to be safe for (some) journalists and retail investors; and above all focused on engagement and attention

I don't put too much stock in the idea that Musk is out to transform Twitter on some fundamental level. Why would he welcome Nazi trolls back on the website if it scared away the journalists he relies on to give him coverage?

To be clear, I don’t think this is benevolent; I think Twitter is bad and transformation would be welcome, if only because it might open new horizons of possibility. But from this perspective, Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter to transform it; he bought it to make sure it stays the same. In some sense that might be the worst outcome of all.