See, the mistake you're making is reading "free speech absolutist" literally. Read it like you're Winston in 1984, instead.

Xeeting from the Xelsa.

I'm thinking something like:

Destination: Gym

Travel time: 10 minutes

Recommended audio: PragerU EXPOSES Fauci Lies (8 min)

Yea but competitors (Apple, Meta, Google, etc.) are better across the board and they would be able to provide alternatives or prevent these activities.

> How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites

Just cherry-picking this one but, but it would get regulated and competitors would come on to the market, and you can also obtain service from traditional providers (ISPs, and mobile providers) like you do today.

Also you can see how well these items work now ala Apple (maybe Google too?). Apple Card, iCloud, iPhone, Car Play, etc. good luck competing with that when people actively hate your products lol. I'm not super worried about this. I'm much more concerned about something like disinformation campaigns on social media or something along those lines than I am any sort of competence with Twitter turning into a dystopian nightmare machine.

Is he going to make an "X" account required to operate a Tesla? Sort of like what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 11, or Facebook did with the Oculus.

Honestly this sounds like it would end up being a net negative.

The US or the EU are not China. People generally don't accept being forced to do things and I wonder about the legality of it all.

> It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future

But in this scenario Twitter is like Vanuatu planning world domination. They have absolutely no leverage to compel anbody to sign up for a Twitter account. Musk would need to spend significanty more money to do any of this, and frankly, I feel like he will spend the coming year being an election provocateur than do anything productive.

Banking and social posting are at odds with one another, at least in countries where people feel they can express themselves unreservedly. In China it works as people are conditioned not to do that.

Unless he aims for influencer branding and consumption of curated content [1] and not the free expression of unpopular opinion, then it's a very cold and one dimensional target market. It's the opposite of what Twitter once was - brief musings thrown into the wind. Instead, people will consciously and deliberately pander to an audience for subs, views, and income. It'll no-longer be a platform for casual, jokey, sarcastic fluff, or raw, honest, and radical perspectives.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-dead-instagram-...

Threads died because the content trends was consistent with that of Facebook, highly monetized and therefore unappealing to Twitter users. Totally irrespective of Threads, Facebook is a superior replacement to Twitter in terms of its systems, and the value of Twitter is its violent flow of unmonetizable content generated by explicitly anonymous users, and so the whole thing is where capitalism goes to die and financially there's just no way out.

That billionaire man paying generous amount to users would have been a fortunate event to users collectively, but that's it.

Google has probably had 100% of every American adult and child in the past 20 years, and they haven't made a dent in payments, even with their own phone ecosystem. This 65m/330m back of the envelope stuff is pure fantasy.

Unless people have no option but to use it, it won't work. For example, the onl reason I use Paypal is that 20 years ago, Ebay didn't offer an alternative. Today, I use it because I can unsubscribe from stuff with one click. I'd never use it otherwise.

Are there major micro/restaurant payment apps in China other than WeChat? I imagine it's difficult to compete with an app that's preinstalled on every phone, integrated with every bank and used by every restaurant and street vendor. And that's ignoring the social network effect of the 900+ million daily users.

What are the competitors and what is their market share/active user base like by comparison?

He is probably making some elaborate libertarian point with this stance, but nobody understands it or even wants to :)

It’s almost as though he’s using that money to bully smaller people because they can’t afford to sue him. Which, in a shocking coincidence, is how Trump ran his companies.

Can't or doesn't... regardless, he isn't. I think his wealth is inflated. When he defaults on his twitter loan, lenders will sell their collateral aka Tesla shares, to make up the difference dragging Tesla down with it and eliminating a huge portion of his wealth and the wealth of people/shareholders invested in Tesla.

Not paying what you owe by contract is not "a negotiation tactic", it is either theft or looming bankruptcy.

more like dragster around it. You know how it goes.

That would be a decent analogy, if only it wasn't said by someone who managed to do almost exactly that a hundred times over.

Who is more believable, a person who has built/built-up and runs several multi-billion dollar companies and accomplished more in his life than 99.999% of people that have ever lived?, or the random person on the internet who likes to anonymously criticize successful people?

Sounds a bit like jealousy to me.

Let me put it another way. If 𝕏 has $6 million to buy another company, why is the company delinquent on hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in debts, including office space rent, google cloud expenses, Oracle services, AWS, and so on?