(note: this post is not an official corporate communication)
it's very funny that twitter was on the verge of escaping the ad-supported internet economy and becoming self-sustaining through Twitter Blue, and now a guy whose only secret to run a profitable company is "get the government to give you billions of dollars a year" is going to use the much-vaunted independence of private ownership to throw the company headlong back down the same hole
the way you square this circle, of course, is:
- twitter isn't actually privately owned by him, only operated -- he had to get a ton of backing from the finance industry to purchase it, and will presumably be serving at their pleasure, which means he's basically just a shit umbrella1 for a bunch of private equity companies and will eventually be the scapegoat for them stealing all of the copper out of the walls;
- as we know from seeing his text messages, elon's friends are a who's-who of the tech status quo, and a lot of them explicitly gushed to him about how profitable the company could be if you made the advertising even worse and more intrusive
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a phrase I learned from my first boss self-describing his role as a manager, intended to connote that the metaphorical shit is coming from above him and he's the one bearing the brunt of stopping it from falling on you