This only makes sense when you understand that he’s intentionally trying to destroy Twitter.

At the risk of sounding tin-foily...

Twitter's financials for server costs have never made sense - the amount of money required to serve the sheer volume of engagement can't possibly have been resolved by ads that Elon is somehow refusing to keep tapping into.

I'd wager that some other interested party engaged in some type of private-public partnership was floating costs for (let's call it "privileged") access to the backend of Twitter -- granting a bottomless pit of funding to keep the platform running no matter the cost.

Once Twitter left the hands of someone deemed trustworthy, that life support doesn't stick around -- leaving Twitter facing complete insolvency by October of this year unless Musk literally does whatever he can to reduce engagement to save on costs.

Twitter loses more money when it has more engagement. If you have 100k users and add a new one, every interaction that additional user makes with tweets viewed by those 100k existing users requires 100k updates pushed to those 100k users' pages. Every like sends an update of +1 like on the tweet to every one of the 100k users. It becomes significantly more expensive per user engagement.

The ads being seen by additional users don't cover that constantly-compounding cost to keep engagements up to date across the platform. Musk isn't being honest about the reasoning (web scraping issues my ass) and is scrambling to buy desperately-needed to keep the platform up past October.

I think this goes to show just how impossible a business model like Twitter's was from the jump and shines a light on the absurdity of it being self-sustaining without a massive source of reliable external funding.

Edit: fixed typo

He's impulsive and doesn't know when to shut up. I got the distinct impression that, initially, he was absolutely not serious about buying Twitter. It was a joke/jest. BUT, because his antics affected their stock price he actually got forced into the purchase and now he's desperately trying to figure out how to make the purchase worth what he actually paid, which is fine and all, except he seems to be leading by impulse, not by consensus or logic. He wakes up in the morning, has some random ass idea and implements it without any oversight. Even his new CEO straight up admitted that she is basically a straw man CEO who will offer no friction to anything Elon wants to do.

Fascists see a community threatening their power, they send in the oligarchs to destroy it. This was always the plan. Same with Reddit. Fediverse is where it's at. We all saw how the attempted Freenode coup went. That garbage human wasn't fooling anyone for even a second. Dude never had a chance.

I think it's important to remember that these companies DID NOT CREATE THIS DATA! They are protecting things that are not theirs.

Great for the fediverse! I suspect that these changes to twitter and reddit are mainly a response to the growing hunger of generative artificial intelligence companies who are hoovering up data, basically for free. Change is never easy, but i'm optimistic that this is the break open source and federated communities needed to start taking off. I hope people can see the value in decentralizing and help support these open source projects financially so that they can really start to scale. The reality is, scaling is expensive, and we all need to help where we can. These Ai companies will not hesitate to suck up federated data also. If we want to live in an ad free world its gonna cost us.

Assuming said data scraping is a real concern for both Twitter and Reddit, are Fediverse servers at similar risk from scrapers and various automated API hits? I don't really know enough about networks to answer.

Wonder what mental gymnastics the fanboys/chuds are doing to spin this into “yes, Mr. Musk you are so smart, please piss on me next”?

I am a dull and simple lad, but I've held a belief ever since Musk purchased Twitter he did it to wreck the platform. I'm still undecided if he's just looking to liquidate its assets, or drive off reasonable users so he can turn it into his personal soapbox.

It must be nice to be able to waste 44 billion dollars and not miss it.

I could live comfortably for the rest of my life on 1/10,000th of what Elon spent.