Thread by @doctorow

Musk is a bad #GAN. He moots things that have the approximate shape of policy (e.g. an illegal forced opt-in to surveillance ads) and then we are supposed to act as #discerners who either lionize or mock that plan.

It's likely that his own senior staff despair of getting him to listen to expert advice, so they leak these policy-esque statements in the hopes that the press will assemble legions of legal experts to go on record about how foolish and dangerous his latest wild hair is.

These experts either convince Musk that he's wrong (but allow him to save face by announcing that he's changed his mind on his own), or they alarm Musk's creditors, who call him up and shout at him.

These creditors can threaten to refuse to extend further credit to him, call in their notes, or (perhaps worst of all) sell those notes to far less chummy, more aggressive creditors who'll make Musk's life hell.

I agree with @glichfield: Musk is a Trumplike object in that he has a job title whose pronouncements would normally warrant close attention on the basis that when this person speaks, they do so in order to convey a carefully planned, serious message:

wired.com/story/donald-t…

But he's just spitballing, bloviating, talking shit and enjoying the sound of his own voice. We shouldn't report on or pay attention to everything that kind of person says, because it's 99% nonsense.

As Lichfied says, "It’s about the actual numbers around Twitter’s advertising, not Musk’s claims that advertisers are coming back. It’s about who’s actually joining and leaving Twitter, not about who’s threatening to leave.

"It’s about Twitter’s role in the world—its importance to natural-disaster management or to any number of communities for whom it’s a store of social wealth—rather than just how much money it will lose."

That's what we should be paying attention to, not half-baked nonsense.