Comment by wpietri
2 years ago
As much as I dislike Musk and what he's done to Twitter, I suspect he didn't intend that. I just think that's the natural outcome of his feelings, his position in society, and his relentless self focus.
David Roth did a good job looking at the dynamic: https://defector.com/the-eternal-mystery-of-a-rich-mans-poli...
And Adam Serwer has a useful take as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/legal-righ...
He's tweeted out some pretty hard right wing talking points and advocated voting for conservatives. It seems pretty intentional.
I agree he holds those opinions. I just don't think his intent in buying Twitter was to put it in the tank for the right.
It's not clear to me that he had a fully formed intent when he made a bid for it. And a big piece of evidence there was that he tried to weasel out and was forced to buy it. Another bit of evidence is the way he has obviously been impulsively half-assing pretty much everything he's done since he took it over. He does not look like a man with a plan.
But to the extent that he had clear intent, I think it was more about hubris. There's this phenomenon in the food industry where a rich person will basically say, "I have eaten at a lot of restaurants, so I'd be really good at running one!" So they will spend a bunch of money on launching and unless they hired competent industry experts and deferred to them, they'll create a clusterfuck. I think it's a similar deal with Musk: He was a dedicated and successful Twitter user, and he thought he could run it better. Turned out it was harder than it looks.