Because the predictions were mainly people hating on rich people. It's very en-vogue. We're mad at all these [celebrities, athletes, CEOs, trust-fund-babies, techbros] for all these "reasons," like I really care if the guy who scored the touchdown is a good dad or something. And just look at the legions of people ready to call anyone a total moron who is on display.

So, Musk bought Twitter with his 44 Billion, and legions of people jumped in line to talk about what an idiot he was for buying it at that price, as if they (or anyone else) know how many billions twitter is worth, or as if they know how billionaires should spend their money.

Then they predicted he would fail immediately because, since he's an idiot and just fired pretty much the whole staff, he can't possibly run something as complex as Twitter.

But then he does, and so they start talking about how he "lost 100+ Billion" between the purchase price and what they perceive as a resulting dip in Tesla stocks. Statistically, 60% of these people can't handle a $1000 financial emergency in their life, but they're experts on big business and billion dollar companies.

Then they started saying they were going to quit twitter, and switch to Mastodon. Some even made the switch, although most seem to be posting in both worlds. But they were being smart, establishing before the inevitable collapse of Twitter.

Then they quit talking about it, because it didn't happen.

The thing is, this whole thing really has little to do with Twitter or its operations. Most of the people commenting on Musk/Twitter have zero fucking clue what twitter is like internally, technologically, what it needs to maintain (tech and culture both), how to improve it, etc etc. They are just hating on rich people.

Ridiculing people on the internet is also a really easy way to get a lot of engagement.

See also: constant disparaging comments about pg (pseudo-intellectual), Bezos (tiny man), Bill Gates, all past presidents, basically anyone making public decisions who is wealthy, all the conspiracies about eating babies and shipping children via wayfair, and on and on for days. This is also largely extending to any unliked groups, like "Russians" and "republicans" will be thought of as less-competent because "we don't like them." Some of these hated groups constitute about half the population. They can still be perfectly competent.

It didn't happen because it turns out Musk probably does know how to run companies.