Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he's crazy.

Elon's goal is to destroy twitter, per his wife.

Wait... so google can just do that? Guess Pinterest bought the premium cloud services and never misses a payment. And tips.

Can I please get this guy's face off my front page? ._.

This is such a great example of the potential consequences of making a decision without understanding the landscape/context. It's obvious this would happen in hindsight.

I saw the result with 227 million earlier, but I just checked again and now it's 648 million. Odd.

One of my coworkers absolutely loves Musk and I can't understand why... The guy's a joke. I feel like people think Musk is smart just because he's eccentric and has money, I hope eventually everyone comes to see just how normally intelligent he actually is

Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.

People with power shouldn't be allowed any control over platforms that give power to "the people". I believe this is all intentional. If it was just Twitter, or just Reddit, or just 1 TV network, I wouldn't think that but they're sabotaging all the mainstream platforms at once and making it incredibly obvious. They're trying to collapse our means of communication ahead of 2024.