I'm not sure Musk knows what he's doing, this feels like a personal vendetta. I'm also not sure he has any likelihood of succeeding in the first place, I wouldn't necessarily assume anyone is going to take him up at that price. And (quite frankly) I don't think that Musk is a very good free speech activist. I think he's regularly hypocritical about free speech and regularly engages in his own forms of censorship; I don't think he has a particularly coherent philosophy about how to approach free speech.

All that being said, I don't really see the problem with him trying this, and I don't necessarily see a ton of downside to him succeeding or failing. I'm perfectly willing to grab the popcorn and just watch.

Twitter is not a great social network, and I don't think it's amazingly well managed. If it gets worse and Musk does a bunch of radical changes, maybe more people will start using Mastodon. If he fails, no harm done. If he joins on and does nothing and just monetizes it more aggressively, then :shrug:, Twitter is probably eventually headed in that direction anyway.

Go for it. I've got no confidence that Musk can actually innovate in this space, and little to no confidence that he'll actually even get the control he wants, and he might actually make things worse if he does succeed, but on a certain level who cares?

It really stinks for artists/communities on Twitter that might be hurt by that happening, but again, I don't really have a lot of confidence that Twitter isn't going to start hurting them anyway, so I don't know that this really matters all that much for them.

:shrug: Maybe 2 years from now I'll look back at this comment and think it's naive.