The takeover of one of the world's most-influential social media sites by the richest man on Earth has been a messy and drawn-out affair.
Usually corporate takeovers are swift, ruthless strikes that play out far from public view.
However, in this case, many of the twists and turns were publicised on the very site that Elon Musk describes as a virtual town square.
From the moment the South African-born billionaire swaggered into San Francisco's Twitter HQ brandishing a bathroom sink, he started to watch his mythology, and his money, swirl down the drain.
Over three chaotic weeks, Elon Musk has fumbled lay-offs, courted controversy over a poll to reinstate Donald Trump's Twitter account and put the company's nervous advertisers on edge.
For his critics, his short tenure at Twitter has punctured the public image Musk so carefully cultivated of a genius, Tony Stark-like figure — the billionaire industrialist from the Iron Man series.
The chaos has left many tech experts questioning whether one of the world's most-famous entrepreneurs has taken on a challenge he's ill-equipped to meet.
The chronically online billionaire
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when a person is at the peak of their powers.
You can only really tell with hindsight well afterwards to definitively declare that was it.
From this vantage point, almost exactly a year ago may have been when Elon Musk was riding closest to the sun.
It was in November 2021 that Elon Musk's wealth was at its gargantuan best.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires index, the then-50-year-old from Pretoria was worth a whopping $US340 billion ($504.67 billion).
His wealth was mainly tied up in electric car company Tesla and space rocket business SpaceX.
He's taken a hit in the past 12 months and is now worth about half of that amount, though he still sits atop the billionaires index.
The tens of billions of dollars he's lost can mostly be excused by events out of his control.
Most large technology companies have suffered as investors have fallen out of love them amid higher interest rates and shaky economic conditions that have presented a far less optimistic picture.
But he needs to take responsibility for at least one major decision that was well within his power: making a bid for Twitter at what is now looking like the worst possible time.
The first real public suggestion that Musk might eventually call the blue bird his own was back in December 2017.
At that point, Musk was feeling the lavender haze towards Twitter and wanted the world to know it.
His declaration prompted a user to suggest he should buy it.
"How much is it?" Musk responded.
Twitter has always had the power to demystify the world's most famous, respected and wealthy people.
With just a few taps on a screen, a hit of the publish button, and the curtain is ripped back on a cultural icon.
Musk regularly indulged in off-colour jokes, dank memes and silly fights.
However, his decision to move from being just a participant to an owner may not only damage his reputation, but also his business interests.
In 2018, he chose to use the platform to suggest a major move for his electric car company.
He'd long argued the market undervalued Tesla so he said he'd simply take it over on the stock exchange.
"Am considering taking Tesla private at $[US]420. Funding secured," he fired off in a tweet.
The tweet caused Tesla stock to surge, but the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused Musk of misleading investors after it became obvious he didn't actually have the finance to take the company private.
He eventually struck a deal with them so that he and Tesla each paid a $US20 million fine. He also agreed he needed to get approval from a Tesla lawyer before tweeting about the company — a move that prompted him to describe the SEC as "bastards".
However, despite his costly tweet, Musk continued to be an active user, doubling down on his memes and social commentary.
Musk finally makes a move on Twitter — but why?
Musk has had a long-term complicated relationship with Twitter, having been an early adopter of what some users refer to as the "hell site".
He joined back in June 2009, but it took him a year to actually tweet something — and that suggests he's been concerned about the site being used for impersonation for a long time.
It's hard to know whether this was the moment when his fixation with Twitter first began.
By 2022, Musk's courtship of Twitter kicked up another gear.
In April, Musk announced to the world that he'd bought a 9.2 per cent stake in the company, worth about $US2.98 billion at the time.
Twitter then announced Musk would become a director, but Musk wasn't interested and, days later, it was announced he wouldn't be taking up his seat on the board.
Instead, he offered to buy all of Twitter for $US54.20 a share, in cash — about $US44 billion ($66.3 billion) in total.
After initially trying to stop the hostile takeover bid, Twitter changed its mind and agreed to accept Musk's offer.
No-one could quite figure out what Musk wanted with the company, which has only occasionally turned a profit since going public in 2013.
Did he buy the platform to advance his increasingly libertarian political views? Did he want, as he claimed, to protect free speech and to "help humanity"?
Or was it all part of an audacious move to turn Twitter into a "super app" upon which payments, social networking and entertainment all happens in one spot?
The plan would turn Twitter into a platform similar to the ubiquitous WeChat app, which has a singular presence in Chinese life.
Whatever his motivation, Musk appeared to get cold feet about the whole affair as soon as his bid was accepted.
He tweeted that the deal was "temporarily on hold" because he wanted to get more information of the number of spam and fake accounts active on the site.
On May 17, Musk announced the deal "cannot move forward'.
The company launched legal action to force him to go through with it and, by October, it was finally settled.
Twitter's new owner was one of its most prolific users.
Not only is he now the chief executive, he's also the second-most-followed person on the platform, wedged between Former US president Barrack Obama and pop star Justin Bieber.
At the time of writing, he had 117 million people following him.
However, from the moment Musk walked into the building as Twitter's new owner, thousands of lives changed forever.
'Am I going to be swept up in this tidal wave?'
Everyone at Twitter expected Musk would lay off staff as soon as he became the boss.
However, it was the devastating speed with which he moved to sack half of the 7,500-strong Twitter workforce that shocked people.
Just a week after Musk arrived, Twitter temporarily closed its offices and then told staff they'd be informed later that day whether they'd still have a job.
Melissa Ingle was a full-time contractor who'd been with Twitter since 2021.
She worked in content moderation, specifically targeting political misinformation — an increasing problem on the site.
Ms Ingle said her colleagues immediately set up a WhatsApp group to stay in touch, recognising many would probably be kicked off Twitter's internal slack channels when they lost their jobs.
She said the employees on America's west coast could see a "wave of firings coming in across the United States" as the first workers in New York City on the east coast began to be locked out of systems. Then it moved towards them.
"It was incredibly grim. Is this coming for me? Am I going to be swept up in this tidal wave?" Melissa wondered as she saw her friends and colleagues laid off in huge numbers.
Melissa survived that first wave, but her boss did not.
She told the ABC that, after her boss disappeared, she spent a week without any assigned work, but attempted to find things to do and "tried to work overtime to prove my worth, in ways that I hoped might matter".
However, in the end, another wave came and took Melissa.
She found out when she got an email saying her access to Twitter software had been revoked.
"That was it. I was done. I was fired. And it wasn't until later that that was communicated in writing to me. It's extremely distressing," she said.
"I worked really hard for a long time on this, I sacrificed my free time."
Despite working full-time hours, she wasn't entitled to any severance or benefits because she was hired as a "contractor".
"The dirty little secret in tech is that [contractors] all work more than 40 hours a week," she said.
"I live in San Francisco. It's one of the most expensive areas in the world. And I need to worry about where my next pay cheque is coming from … I have nothing coming my way down the line."
Is Musk's Twitter 2.0 doomed?
Even after the initial wave of firings, Musk wasn't finished.
He sent remaining staff an email asking them to sign a loyalty pledge to show fealty to "hard core" Twitter 2.0, demanding they work long hours at "high intensity".
Those who hadn't ticked the box by the deadline would be effectively resigning.
The problem was a lot of staff weren't willing to sign their lives away to the new boss who had already caused so much chaos in such a short period.
After realising that many key staff hadn't signed on, Twitter management went into emergency mode, locking down the offices for four days and trying to cajole some to stay onboard.
Even before taking control of Twitter, Musk had blasted remote working, demanding his staff work at least 40 hours in the office or "pretend to work somewhere else".
Faced with the prospect that he'd be left with only a handful of foreign employees who were bound to the company by the terms of their work visas — and therefore didn't have the luxury of quitting — Musk softened his stance.
So-called "exceptional staff" can now return to working from home with the agreement of management.
However, in other ways, Musk is still thumbing his nose at his critics, even after three weeks of his chaotic rein at Twitter.
The "free speech absolutist" ran an unscientific poll on his personal Twitter account to gauge if people wanted Donald Trump to be allowed to reclaim his account.
A slim majority of the voters chose "yes", so he reactivated the account.
This is despite the fact the former president was banned for repeatedly lying on the site and spreading dangerous misinformation that led to the riot at the Capitol on January 6.
His only line in the sand, so far, seems to be US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been ordered to pay billions of dollars in compensation to the families of Sandy Hook massacre victims.
Musk said he would not allow someone back on the site who has profited off the murder of children.
Musk is now the chief executive of three major multi-billion-dollar companies, each with their own particular challenges.
At Tesla and Space X, demanding his staff put in gruelling hours, threatening bankruptcy and mass firings were tried and tested techniques that paid off.
"Tesla has to be hard core and demanding," he wrote to company staff in 2017.
"The passing grade at Tesla is excellence, because it has to be."
However, his scorched-earth approach at an established social media company has so far not worked.
"He's able to do some pretty amazing things, but has got into an area that's well outside his depth and thinks a bullying management culture can change it — and that's not going to work at a company like Twitter," Chris Kelly, a Facebook executive and early investor in SpaceX, said at a tech summit in London earlier this week.
"The massive cutbacks and chainsaw that Elon Musk has taken to the company does not bode well for its future."
A chief executive who is gifted with great ability and confidence, Musk may eventually be able to turn Twitter around and make it a profitable company.
If that were to happen, his reputation as a Silicon Valley visionary might be somewhat restored.
However, by buying his favourite website and trying to rebuild it in his own image, Musk may have overplayed his hand.
Perhaps the true cost of purchasing Twitter will prove to be higher than he is willing to pay.
