Musk, an atypical Typical Twitter user

Elon Musk's use of Twitter tends to be the same as ours. He likes to joke, but not as hilariously as he thinks; he's too eager to share, keen on Mim's occasional overdoing and getting himself into trouble; he seems to feel that the platform unfairly suppresses the views of the groups he identifies with. Thanks to Twitter's flattening effect, the only real difference between the site's regular users and Musk is about $257 billion in assets and 85.4 million followers. He has more fans than The Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy, Damadas Modi, but not as much as Taylor Swift. He was the richest man in modern human history. He also found the number "420" so hilarious that his final offer (an average of $54.20 per share, or about 355.5 yuan) seemed just to include the number.

Musk has suppressed so much personal wealth on a website that has been denounced by countless users, which is quite surprising. According to documents filed with the SEC, Musk himself will come up with as much as about 13.8 billion yuan in cash to complete the deal, equivalent to 8% of his net asset value. If that money is burned, he's still the richest man in the world. However, if you set the time back to 2019, the money will be 100% of Musk's net asset value. The rapid growth of his wealth and his enthusiasm for using the platform as a tool for disorderly communication matched, making the acquisition an almost infinite cycle — his billionaire wealth was closely tied to his eccentric personality. Now, he has completely used his billionaire wealth to buy this platform that can show his true face to the public.

In a sense, this is nothing more than a reenactment of billionaires' access to important vehicles of public discourse, and there is nothing new about it. As you may have noticed, this sort of thing happens a lot lately. In 2013, Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for a relatively small $250 million. Five years later, Patrick Soon-Shiong-controlled investment firm from South Africa like Musk bought the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego United Tribune for about $500 million. Meanwhile, Laurin Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs' billionaire, has been making media investments, most notably The Atlantic.

No matter how you interpret it all, these publications have a highly independent editorial team that is bound by journalistic norms that have been formed over decades — norms that they often follow on Twitter as well. Twitter, by contrast, is a site where you can log in and speak freely. Musk has said he wants Twitter to speak more freely. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the current content censorship policy — which has reignited a headache for the culture wars debate. The site has been good at pushing for discussions like: Would Musk allow any form of speech — even Nazi rhetoric? Why are liberals so afraid of free speech? This discussion went back and forth all day. But either way, the same fact makes one side happy and the other scared: a person will reshape the platform exactly as he sees himself, and he seems to do so primarily for fun, and possibly for profit. Conservative cartoonist Ben Garrison described the acquisition this way: He portrayed Musk as a half-human, half-cat, breaking into Twitter's birdcage, angrily stroking the bird's head and grunting "Beautiful bird!" I'll teach you to say "Freedom of speech!" "And that's a positive interpretation of that."

On a platform where many users are primarily focused on the site itself, Musk's acquisition is a bit crazy. Twitter's text box will still prompt each user "What's new?" "No matter what new news there is, they're always following Twitter. This simple fact may explain 99% of the sharp comments on Twitter. These comments are rarely about outside events and are often about the content of other tweets. Almost everyone who uses Twitter feels aggrieved in some way, but there's just no way. A perverse fact associated with this is that the more power and followers a person accumulates, the more likely he is to be seen as a model of all the mistakes in the world – especially the winner of the entire global capitalist game. No wonder Musk thinks there's still value to be unleashed: He loves the site, even though his experience on it is likely to be terrible.

Since Musk is the richest man on Earth, it's easy for many to think that the deal isn't about renovating and updating the "Digital City Plaza" but for a more sinister or stupid purpose. Some, including Jeff Bezos, the second-richest man on earth, have speculated that Tesla's presence in the Chinese market actually made it more censored after Twitter was owned by Musk. There are also concerns that he now has a private message from a reporter; some find it funny. There are fears he will bring back another super-rich user of the platform, former President Donald Trump; others find the idea exciting. He expressed a desire to control the robot trolls. When you have 85.4 million followers, talking about cryptocurrencies, stock prices, and the numbers 420 and 69 on Twitter, that could be a bigger problem for you. On Monday, people kept uploading ugly photos of him — when he was PayPal or with Gershlynne Maxwell — joking that it was the last day such photos could not be deleted.

That's what makes his acquisition troubling: people feel strongly — even in the calmest times — that it's an act of vanity, just to improve the personal experience of one user across the square. This makes sense. Musk exudes a desire for others to find him interesting. This is a disease that cannot be cured no matter how much money it is. Perhaps his most resonant qualities. His performance on Saturday Night Live was almost intolerable — even by contemporary Saturday Night Live standards — especially his monologue, filled with the astonishing defense mechanism of "please don't go black": he declared himself the first host to suffer from Asperger's syndrome; his mother appeared on stage, hugged him, told him that she loved him, and he also issued a statement about his vision for the future: "I believe in the future of renewable energy; I think that humanity must become a multi-planetary space civilization."

After that, he paused and said, "These are exciting targets, aren't they?" I don't think I'll have any trouble if I push these hairs. But I will also post 'it's the 69th day after 4/20 haha' - I don't know, I think it's funny. That's why there's a 'haha' at the end. Well, I know sometimes what I say, send something weird, but that's what my mind is. If anyone feels offended, I want to say: I reinvented the electric car, and I'm going to send people to Mars with a spaceship. Do you think I'll be an ordinary normal person? ”

The mindset of Twitter users has never been summed up so clearly: I know you may not like my jokes, but you know, I'm actually pretty cool. For Musk's point, the market has already given a huge return; as the birthplace of the "guillotine Mim", Twitter has not given him — at least not a consistent return. However, thanks to the former, all of Musk's grievances about the latter are likely to reshape Twitter — it's the closest place we can find to a digital city square. We don't know what to lament about this change of owners, only that such a thing will really happen.

It also illustrates what a dizzying experience it is to live in a society where one person can control such a huge amount of wealth: their whimsy can easily become a reality – we all waste work time on this stupid website, but their whimsy can reshape the site. Previously, Twitter operated as a collective farm (a common collective community system in Israel), but it was responsible for a diverse group of stakeholders: Wall Street, customers, users, the media, the government, etc. Now, however, after a $44 billion joke, it needs to be influenced by a person who can see that anyone who has a distinctly complex relationship with the site's services.

If his experience here as a user will determine the way he manages this place, then his experience as a visionary for grand real-world projects may not apply to the arduous management of a chaotic place like Twitter: here where hundreds of millions of people have improvised, often unpleasant conversations that these people themselves have no need to talk; it's a place that reshapes a lot of industries and practices; it's a monetized platform that makes money selling ads, but most people just think of it as a joke. A place to share links; over the past decade, this service has enabled a very small number of influential people in humanity to devote a significant portion of their spare time and thoughts, resulting in far-reaching and unpredictable results. Perhaps he will soon discover that Twitter is not a sophisticated science — it's a lot harder than science.