Not necessarily. What if the media company was bad for the health of democracy, and the billionaire's incompetence destroys the company's social standing and thus its ability to do more damage (even in the billionaire's own interests)?
(Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform. And Twitter imploding without a designated archive will wipe out a tremendous amount of digital history.)
A lot of his decisions look pretty incompetent in the surface, like how could he not see how charging for verification devalue the system to whoever has the money?
Instead it could just be an intentional ploy to completely devalue Twitter disguised as incompetence. He can justify firing employees and charging for API access/verification as money-saving strategies, even if they're terrible strategies that have little chance of succeeding. And he could make enough people believe he's an idiot who makes things up as he goes rather than someone specifically driven or apathetic enough to run Twitter into the ground. Not to mention he was forced to buy them after changing his mind. Almost feels like a "so that's what happens" response.
I wonder how higher powers would be able to distinguish fake incompetence from real incompetence. Would they care how Twitter as a private company ends up if it's the case that it implodes from its own legitimately bad business decisions? It reminds me of how employers won't directly fire employees for discriminatory reasons, instead they make the employees' lives miserable so they're compelled to leave on their own, thus they escape scrutiny.
> (Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform.
If there's not an obvious successor, right when its shutdown, a lot of those people might get their habit broken and find something better to do. I know Mastodon was held up as a successor, but it's unclear to me if that's actually capable of scaling to that level.