Back in April, I wrote that, “The tight integration and interrelationship of Big Tech means that Musk won’t be allowed to take over Twitter. And he knows it too. I suspect this is a game whose upshot will be demonstrating the narrow limits of competition and mobility in a landscape dominated by a handful of huge companies and funds.”
The game reached its inevitable conclusion.
Inevitable, if you understand that Musk didn’t get his net worth by throwing a lot of money at a company whose actual worth is dubious and which has no viable business model. Combine that with a recession and Tesla’s own challenges and the deal made no financial sense whatsoever.
I strongly suspect that the prospective deal was never anything more than financial theater, a kind of perverse prospective marriage situation in which neither side wanted to be the one to officially call it off, but neither also wanted to go through with it. Musk will profit from it, as he does from everything else, and so will Twitter.
But the actual default state of censorship will remain the same. I predicted that back in the spring and it’s now quite obviously true. Whatever games Musk and Twitter were playing, none of them would be allowed to alter the status quo.
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