Kevin Drum –

I know this is obvious, but . . .

Everybody seems to have forgotten what Elon Musk’s real problem with Twitter is. The wellspring of everything that’s happened since last year was a single moment of stupidity in which he agreed to massively overpay for it. And it’s not like he doesn’t know this. He tried desperately to get out of the deal, and took over the company only after a court forced him to.

At that point he was stuck with a massively unprofitable business, so he laid off half the staff and then embarked on a series of hare-brained schemes to raise revenue. Some of these schemes have been dumber than others, and none of them have even remotely worked, but that’s because nothing will work. I’m unable to conceive of any plan that would raise enough money to make Twitter a break-even proposition, let alone profitable. And the only alternative is to pump endless billions of personal dollars into it, not exactly an appealing proposition.

So, sure, Musk is destroying Twitter. But who wouldn’t? I don’t think there’s a human being on earth who could fix Twitter. At best they could be a little less flaky about sending it down the drain, but that’s probably all.