By now, the outlines of the story are well-known: a staff of 7,500 slashed by 75%; a free-speech absolutism that welcomed banned users back to the platform, along with a surge of hate speech and misinformation; an advertising crisis in which more than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers shut their purses; and a confounding corporate rebrand that replaced Twitter and the familiar tweet with a literal Brand X.
And throughout it all, nonstop drama. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the world’s richest person, has defined his conquest of Twitter by innovating on spectacle above all. With each curious or controversial move since acquiring the social media company, Musk’s most successful feat has been forcing the world to pay attention.
