On Twitter

Elton Must has bought Twitter for $44 billion. Some of it his own money, most borrowed, from the Middle East, it appears.

Elton thinks he is a genius.

He might be in the electic car business, but on mass transport and probably social media, less so.

His hyperloop, which was much trumpted by him and his techy mates, has been dismantled recently, and the site is now a car park. People who work in transport explained why hyperloop wouldn't work, the same way in which autopilots on cars won't work either, Elton thought he knew best.

Reality thought other wise.

And so to twitter.

Yesterday morning, approx 50% of its staff were laid off, including all of the adviary board and 75% of the moderation teams.

First question is: what is Twitter (the company). I think it is a content moderation company, whose actions stop the platform becoming more of a hellsite than it already is. Point here is, without moderation it very quickly becomes a very unpleasant place to spend time in, and companies won't advertise.

Which is what is happening. There is a mass migration to other platforms, mastadon for one, and advertising revenue is plummeting. But this is not Elton's fault, no its those darned Leftie pressure groups. Here is another free marketer blaming the free markets.

Twiiter may or may not survive.

Friends Reunited thrived, then failed and is forgotten.

MySpace also thrived and failed.

What is to stop Twitter going the same way?

Mostly the people he fired and lack of users.

On FB I follow a feed called Bored Panda, which produces diverting posts, mostly with pictures, but sometimes stories. One was of a guy who worked in an engineering company. He had been there since year dot, be was the factory's tool maker, all to his own design, he drew the blueprints and did maintenance. New guy comes in, things old dude does nothing, fires him. Toolmaker takes the blueprints, maintenance documents and everything else with him, and factory falls over within a month.

It takes a lot of people to keep Twitter from falling over, remove half of them then it probably will. Question then will be, who soon can Elton get it up and running?

And, of course, it'll never be his fault.