Shall We See The End of Tweeting Soon?

Welp, all my efforts as a Gen Xer to stay hip and cool with all the newest social media apps since 2007 have all gone for naught, because one of the apps I've gotten addicted to in the past 15 years might finally crash and burn now that another oligarch has seen fit to buy his way into media domination.

In short: Greedhead Elon Musk just bought out Twitter for 44 BILLION DOLLARS. Via Lauren Feiner at CNBC: 

Twitter’s board has accepted an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social media company and take it private, the company announced Monday...

The cash deal at $54.20 per share is valued at around $44 billion, according to the press release. Twitter would become a private company on completion of the deal, which requires shareholder and regulatory approval...

Okay, my first thought was "Crap, they're letting the narcissistic billionaires in, there goes the neighborhood."

Second thought was "WHERE THE HELL DID MUSK DREDGE UP 44 BILLION DOLLARS in the first place???" Was that pocket change hiding in the sofa cushions or something?

Seriously, you know anybody with 44 BILLION DOLLARS lying around they can use to just buy a large-scale social media app like they were buying groceries?

Why even bother to spend so much in the first place? Musk tried buying his way onto the company's board a week or two ago, only to get thwarted by some of the regulations set in place for publicly-traded companies. So, his solution was to sledgehammer the entire process with a massive buyout and take Twitter private.

Why the hell is he so desperate trying to buy this social media app?

Forget the line he's trying to sell to the public about his interest in Twitter. This is not about encouraging free speech, or bringing his "brand" of innovation to improve security or service to a cornerstone of global social media. No, what Elon Musk is doing is Buying speech, there is nothing FREE about what he's doing. From here it's looking like Musk wants control over one of the many social networks that have openly derided his - and other billionaires' - obsessions with space travel, his self-marketing overkill, his lack of genuine philanthropy, his business model of racism in his workplaces, and more.

Musk's call for a more open Twitter runs the serious risk of creating an environment of lax rules governing online behavior. Twitter already has problems with online harassers, raging haters, and sociopathic doxxers looking to bully and threaten people because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and/or political beliefs. Musk is poised to make things worse.

While Twitter as a social media app eventually became a business looking for ad revenues and profitability, it still served as a relatively free and easy-to-use app that people rallied to as a means to get instant news and updates from people they know, in a way faster and more satisfying than other major apps like Facebook. Its limited character count required savvy messaging in short sentences, allowing for clever snark and witty repartee (but also the trolling nightmares of direct insults and death threats).

For ill and for good, Twitter became a dominant means of getting news AND opinions out there, which mainstream media scooped up and gobbled for all its worth. On the bright side, it connected the world in ways other social media apps couldn't, passing along news of tragedies and victories faster than professional reporters could. It got the messages out in places and situations where dictators and despots couldn't stop them.

On the dark side, it got us donald trump tweeting out his racism and sexism and bullshit gaslighting. It got bad enough to where even Twitter had to suspend his ass because trump crossed the code of conduct lines too many times.

Rumor is Elon Musk is looking to buy Twitter so he could open up the rules of conduct and allow the likes of trump back on it, possibly seeing money to be made on ragetweets attracting more views than ever before. It seems unlikely, given how eager a lot of current Twitter users are about to jump ship if Musk ever invites that Shitgibbon back on. It's more likely Musk would make an attempt to overwhelm Twitter users with his godless Bitcoin crypto scams.

Either way, we're seeing an end to a troubled yet useful social media app getting bought out by a billionaire ready to twist that product into an unrecognizable mess. Sort of like what happened to Tumblr, which never recovered from unpopular policy changes under new management. 

The talk now is about escape plans. Saving your Twitter history to a zipped archive for future civilizations to find. The next social media app everyone can congregate to that won't be threatened by an oligarch's buyout anytime soon.

It's not TikTok by the way. China owns THAT already.