The Atlantic writes that "liberal users on Twitter have greeted the news of Musk’s pending acquisition of the platform with everything from indifference to despair." Count me as residing within the indifference realm. I don't much care if Elon buys Twitter or forgets all about it and goes careening off into some other temporary obsession.
"I don't much care" does not mean I don't care at all. My marginal hope is what The Atlantic also writes: that "right-wing alternatives to Twitter have failed to take off because conservatives want to make liberals miserable, not build a community in which there are no libs left to own. If conservatives successfully drive their targets off Twitter, or if the network becomes an unusable cesspool, it will become similarly worthless, both financially and politically."
Hallelujah. Let right-wing anarchy reign, and cause the walls of their jeremiads to come tumbling down. So I kinda care about Twitter's pending sale.
Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook offers this (emailed) Musk-clusterfuck news:
Musk took aim at Twitter employees and others this week in a round of tweets that raised new concerns about the company’s future under his freewheeling approach to content moderation. (He also said — with tongue presumably in cheek — that he would buy Coca-Cola next, "to put the cocaine back in.")
Musk criticized a longtime Twitter executive who has shaped its content policies. He tweeted that a past moderation decision by Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and safety expert, was "obviously incredibly inappropriate." He later posted a meme mocking Gadde. Almost immediately, some people began tweeting abusive, racist and sexist attacks at her.
"Let’s make Twitter maximum fun!" Musk also tweeted. But the company’s current and former leaders did not appear to share that sentiment. Here is how some of them reacted to his criticisms:
"Bullying is not leadership," tweeted Dick Costolo, who was Twitter’s C.E.O. from 2010 to 2015. He also responded to the meme Musk posted, writing: "what’s going on? You’re making an executive at the company you just bought the target of harassment and threats." [Editorial note: I detest the overused word "meme" nearly as much as I detest the quickly hackneyed phrase of "cancel culture."]
Twitter’s C.E.O., Parag Agrawal, offered a muted defense of his staff. He tweeted that he was "proud" of employees who were working to improve Twitter "despite the noise." In private, Twitter employees grumbled that he wasn’t outspoken enough in defending them....
Could Musk back out of the deal? Some investors are still betting on it, with Twitter’s stock trading below Musk’s offer price.... And Tesla’s stock has fallen by around a fifth since Musk first revealed his stake in Twitter, reflecting worries that a distracted C.E.O. could be bad for the electric carmaker.... And there are questions about the financial viability of the deal: Twitter would take on some $13 billion in debt as part of Musk’s buyout, versus about $5 billion on its balance sheet now, and its earnings are modest relative to that much bigger interest bill.
By the way, I definitely don't care, not one bit, about Tesla.