Elon Musk Is Not, And Has By no means Been, Good At Twitter

There’s an incredible irony in the truth that Twitter is now owned by Elon Musk, one of many web site’s most prolific, influential, and most-mocked customers.

Musk’s alchemical tweets can flip memecoins into gold, and spark seismic shifts within the inventory market, however his humorousness consists of dad jokes, weed jokes, and off Reddit memes.

Among the wittiest posters on Twitter lean on irony, surrealism, or simply vomit out no matter half-baked thought occurs to be pulsing by means of their neurons, however Musk is an enormous fan of puns – the cornier, the higher. His tweets learn just like the musty pages of an out-of-print joke e book, and his replies inevitably appeal to sharp-tongued responses from funnier customers, alongside along with his hoard of simpering sycophants, portray the display yellow with cry-laughing emojis.

That quaint, out-of-touch humor was on full show the second Musk first stepped foot into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, so he may tweet, “let that sink in.” He adopted up that killer punchline by shedding half of his new workers (the humorous half is, Twitter is reportedly rehiring a lot of them).

Up to now, Musk’s management has proved as clunky and humorless as his posts; regardless of declaring that “comedy is now authorized on Twitter,” Musk quickly discovered that he was the butt of the joke.

In response to Musk’s takeover, and official “legalization” of comedy, the location was inundated with a barrage of racial slurs, prompting the comic Trevor Noah to quip that maybe Musk ought to cost white customers to submit the N-word, in response to Musk’s plan to cost $8-per-month for a verification checkmark.

Musk spent a number of days responding to high-profile, verified customers who had been crucial of his deliberate paywall, haggling with creator Stephen King like a used automobile salesman, and responding sarcastically to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. No matter one’s opinion of Musk, it isn’t essentially the most skilled method to run a enterprise, and didn’t precisely encourage confidence within the web site’s userbase.

Fearing that Musk was going to tank Twitter, lots of the web site’s verified customers took it upon themselves to troll Musk, impersonating his account and writing quite a lot of absurd and offensive posts.

Following the wave of impersonators, Musk out of the blue reversed his stance on permabanning (which he beforehand acknowledged ought to solely be reserved for bots and scammers), and introduced that any accounts impersonating others with out clearly labeling themselves as a parody could be completely suspended.

Watching Musk react, in actual time, to being mercilessly mocked by the userbase of the platform he simply purchased for $44 billion, is definitely the funniest factor he’s ever completed. It’s like an formidable, out-of-control Nathan Fielder sketch (by the way, do you know that Musk reportedly made a behavior of inviting Fielder to events, and would try and make the deadpan comic chortle?).

Musk appears to wish to depart his mark on Twitter, to go away an inimitable imprint on the location, the best way that the psychedelic ramblings of former President Donald Trump used to, earlier than he was completely banned. However Musk merely doesn’t share Trump’s expertise for turning deliriously petty feuds into pure poetry; you may’t purchase that sort of unhinged expertise.

It’s wildly unclear what the longer term holds for Twitter; essentially the most cynical predictions of a glitchy web site riddled with paywalls, intrusive advertisements and crypto schemes may truly come to cross. Or maybe issues will cool down, as Musk shifts gears in a panic, accelerating again to a extra wise path in response to backlash.

It doesn’t matter what occurs to Twitter, it’s absolutely a protected guess that Musk’s posts will stay “cringe.”