He just needs a different strain!
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Heads up, Elon!
Thereās a significant overlap between Musk fans and crypto ābrosā, including Muskās role as a promoter of various tokens last year. If it now turns out that there are massive losses in crypto, potentially accompanied by fraud charges, I think a lot more people are going to be leveling a variety of accusations at Musk about his multiple exaggerations and outright falsehoods. Regulators were asleep at the wheel on crypto, so may also feel the need to show they can be proactive about something else.
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Well this going perfectly according to plan. But to be fair, I do admire Musk for following the āfail fastā principle. This is an idea that rather than doing long vetting of new ideas, you try fast, fail fast, and keep what works.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/twitter-impersonators-paid-verification
Although this quote from Musk belowā¦ only response here is ānot sure if seriousā. The credit card absurdity aside, I wonder if he has the self-awareness to realize that if he defines a bad actor as one who promotes hate speech, violence, conspiracy theories, and tries to influence elections, then he himself is a āwealthy bad actorā.
Musk argued during a Twitter Spaces event with advertisers Wednesday that even wealthy bad actors such as state-sponsored disinformation agents would eventually be deterred because they may run out of credit card and phone numbers.
Musk wants half of revenue to come from subscriptions. Given they generated $5B in 2021, even to get half of that from subscriptions would mean 26M people (about 10% of the former active user base) paying $8/month):
Iām starting to think that heāll be right in suggesting āthere is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturnā (though Iād say thereās a good chance Twitter wonāt survive him). That could have significant knock-on effects for the rest of his empire.
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So if heās going to do his own thing even at the expense of the revenue and subscribers, then whatās the end game? What does he think Twitter is, or should be? Is it a 1993 BBS? Is it early Facebook? Geocities with Vines? The Metaverse? I realize itās only been a week, and he was spending most of the runup to the purchase trying to escape it, but he has to have some idea what he wants to do with this thing. $44b is a lot of money, even to him.
I believe heās got a couple things going on. First is the pragmatic problem of money management and the huge number of employees that he canāt fathom. I expect heās assuming his changes are going to result in some sort of short-term calamity anyway, so why not chop the staff at the same time and get all of it over with ASAP. His second concern is the whole vision thing, and what he plans to implement over the next 2, 12 and 22 months. And finally heās still a Twitter user at heart and heās got some posing and attitude to express. Alas his individual proclivities are not going to make his professional challenges easier. āFree Speech Absolutistsā are not great hosts for most ad buys. Has he seen 4chanās advertisers? Itās not the Fortune 500.
So I think itās going to be a rough 2023, but in the end I think Twitter will be a lot like what you saw early on, before moderation worked well and advertisers trusted them. Itāll be a little sloppy, fewer people will spend time there, some other platform will become the lazy PR teamās launch site of choice, but Elon will have a place to play. Not how most of us would spend that kind of money, but I suppose people with less money than me wonder what Iām doing some days.
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Yup.
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He just announced in an all hands meeting that he doesnāt know how long the run rate can sustain and bankruptcy is possible
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Iām confident business will improve if he just continues his current plan of scaring away advertisers and users, cutting staff, and ruling by fear.
Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty has also left the company, according to a person familiar with the situation who asked to remain nameless because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
āI donāt watch Game of Thrones. I certainly donāt want to play it at work,ā Fogarty tweeted Monday.
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A post on another forum that made me lol:
āItās not often we get to see someone take a flamethrower to $44B worth of cash in real-time!ā
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So Musk is already talking about bankruptcy?:
None of it, or may be not much of it, makes much sense. But in the back of my mind, Iām thinking heās playing chess and weāre playing checkers. Heās the āevil genius.ā 
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The trouble with bankruptcy is that only a little of the money is borrowed. He might be able to stiff the banks for the $13b, but at the cost of his own $31b. The 4D chess is clearly beyond my ken.
Twitterās legal department is telling developers to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements.
If Iām a software developer at Twitter, no way in heck am I self-certifying FTC compliance without first making a call to the whistleblower line just to CYA while hunting for another job. When the legal department says, āI donāt want to do it, you do itā thatās a big flashing red sign that you shouldnāt do it.
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Is it ok to link to a tweet? If so, take a read through. This verification for anyone with $8 is going to cost Musk the last of his advertisers (and probably get him sued).
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPHilll/status/1590899514638229506?s=20&t=ICh2DmswZ2X-txkvdi4oBg
Why is it such a big deal if Twitter goes under? There are plenty of other options to take its place.
I donāt think itās a big deal for Twitter to go under, per se. Lots of jobs sacrificed because of a vanity project so Iām sad for that, but itās a juicy story because of the tech bros who were so sure that Elon is a genius and believed his all free speech all the time line (unless you make fun of Elon, of course) and then watching that crash and burn. And the thought of just setting fire to billions of dollars. I think the Twitter disaster and the FTX mess make those who arenāt high fliers feel smug.
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