Elon Musk has owned Twitter for less than a week and it is already clear that the world’s richest man has no firm idea of what he wants to do with his $44bn folly. The easy bit was firing a few top executives, including the chief executive and the person in charge of content moderation. The rest is a muddle.
Musk has been combining platitudes (Twitter should be “warm and welcoming to all”) with sketchy thoughts on future revolutions. Split the site into strands to allow consenting adults to indulge in spats? Charge users $20 a month to have a “blue tick” verified account? Bring back Vine, a video-sharing app closed by Twitter in 2016? All have been floated as possibilities, but none is yet a policy. It all smacks of an attention-seeking exercise rather than a strategy.
