When Elon Musk closed on what looked like a massive overpay for Twitter, I scoffed along with everyone else. What we all failed to see was the savviness of Musk’s purchase and, more importantly, his true endgame (as much as Musk could be said to have one).
In terms of bluntly inserting himself into the daily conversation, the value of Twitter, now X, has been priceless. The closest precedent may be the media empire built by William Randolph Hearst — and Musk has been able to do it all with just one little microblogging site.
Sure, the sale is considered the worst merger-finance transaction since the financial crisis for all those banks that agreed to help Musk with the purchase, probably due in part to the fact that usage in the United States has fallen by 23 percent. But even with the drop in X’s usage, and a desperate need to fill X’s void in the social media universe, nothing has emerged to take its place at the head of The Discourse’s table.
The kind of safe spaces that could be microblogging refuges for the media literati repulsed by Musk and his favorite president, Donald Trump — services like Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads — simply haven’t developed the same primacy as X. The service remains a go-to for tracking news as it breaks, even if it is poorly fact-checked in real time. The mainstream media itself can’t resist........