He bought the users. Elon knows that people are lazy and will not change websites.

Dude could have created his own Mastodon insrance for practically nothing. Is he somehow even dumber than Trump?

Let's be honest Elon doesn't care about Twitter.

He bought it with money he doesn't have. He only increased in net worth since the takeover and has successfully done what he wanted to, destroy an organization he thought was problematic and now everyone gives even more data to Facebook.

Everyone of them won.

I'm still convinced there is money coming in from an outside influence that is paying him to destroy Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing is happening to Reddit as well

The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.

Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they'd be immediately run out of the venue, despite "angry, dissaffected, young people" being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.

When the internet did come along, initially things weren't much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they'd "raid" other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn't figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.

When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.

Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to "alt-right", the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.

From there, the "mask on, hide your powerlevel" stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.

By the time Charlottesville's swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.

Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they'd slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of "as far-right as we can get away with". They'd move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.

But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you'd hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of "freedom of speech" any more.

Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren't being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn't breed more of them.

So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.

The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.

Simple. He didn't shit-talk Truth Social in a legally binding way and then have his bluff called by people with enough financial resources to survive the lengthy court battle.

He probably experiences less personal financial loss from running Twitter into bankruptcy now that he has been forced to buy it. He even gets to use it as his personal ego-stroking machine in the meantime.

But he may have experienced significant personal loss had he decided to continue fucking around with the SEC (or was it one of the other agencies?), whom he had previously pissed off.

If you view his words and actions through the lens of what will make him the most money or lose him the least, his actions make sense. Add a significant dash of arrogant impulsive invincibility too. He's comfortable telling us about Twitter's financial problems because starving it gets rid of it and let's him focus on his other vanity projects.

It's not like they can send him to jail for being a bad manager. It's not like he's going to pay his bills. It's not like he even used all of his own money to buy Twitter in the first place. What does it matter to him?

The d*ck contest. It's all about who has the biggest.

Thanks to Elon, there will never be another Arab Spring. Most of the money came from investors where that is a big plus. Elon invested a surprisingly small amount of his own money given the 44b total. Even a shattered Twitter will be a bigger soapbox than truth social. 6-8B of his own money, which he may have already extracted from twitter as a loan, is not a big deal to him.

He wanted to prove he doesn't care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost

People actually use that trash? Education is key people.