He's not that smart. He got stuck having to buy Twitter after his pump and dump backfired. His solution to having to buy Twitter was to cut costs by firing staff and use his celebrity to manufacturer engagement with troll posts.

The problem he missed was that staff was necessary to keep hate speech under control and his trolling meant to drive engagement would backfire from advertisers and regulators.

I wouldn't say idiot, just very naive when it comes to your assessment of Musk's ability to think ahead. He's basically a South African Alex Jones who started out rich(er) 🤷

There has been an increase in blatant racism and prejudice. I don't know if those users eventually get banned. If the right takes any action against blatant hate speech, shitheads like Tim Pool will start crying and denounce the platform as not allowing free speech. If they allow "free speech," then the shitheads eventually drive all the normal people off the platform. The only good thing is that Twitter already has a left wing population, so as long as they can maintain that, it should avoid turning to shit. It was also a mainstream platform so hopefully that should maintain the normie population.

Sites like Lemmy instances are better at allowing a wider range of "free speech" because as long as the instance population is large enough to keep the shitheads a minority, they can stick to their own subs and generally keep the bullshit quarantined.

Wasnt truth social already that?

I think it's not impossible that the goal was simply to discredit Twitter entirely

You'd be right. 10 days before he bought it, Musk got linked a plan to buy twitter and turn it into right-wing American WeChat.

I heard about it on Rachel Maddow's October 2 show (has it really been 2 months since then?)

Not sure why you’d assume you sound like an idiot. You’re just coming to a hypothesis based on all available information. It seems like a sane train of reasoning based on all the empirical evidence we’ve seen thus far.

It’s likely that he didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did, or that he hoped there’s a bigger appetite or marketplace for X in this capacity. It’s also possible he didn’t think it all through as was made more likely by the way he was trying to come up with reasons to get out of the deal.

He's just a stupid narcissist that came into money. They don't think that far ahead, and it makes him look bad so he wouldn't want this outcome