Elon Musk takes over Twitter

Thank you for this.

He is an unstable douchebag and attention seeker. But at the same time, the level of scrutiny for everything Twitter related now is minute.

Twitter was not a great business before he bought it. It was dying a very slow death. He hastened that death with the amount of debt he loaded the balance sheet up with (to do a highly leveraged purchase of the company). And he had no plan behind any of this, so it has left him flailing. ... he needs for the company to be something that it isn't, in order to generate income that it doesn't. That is the root of all the changes. ... the laying off so many people, trying to sell anything that isn't bolted down, trying to monetize everything. He has no choice, actually, because if he kept Twitter the way it was, he may not have destroyed the company as quickly as all of his missteps are now doing it, but it was guaranteed failure with the debt load he has taken on. He will likely fail magnificently either way, but at least if he slings enough shit and tries enough things, some of things might work and solve what is a very dire and serious cash flow problem.

That is the context you need to understand surrounding him wanting to monetize Twitter's API. He needs the company to earn money that it doesn't. It may backfire on him. ... for example, if there are a lot of people going to a twitter feed to see when the next New York City subway is going to be arriving to time their walk to a station, he is going to lose those users. But how valuable were those users ever? An ad-based model isn't lucrative enough to drive the cash flow he needs with all the debt he took on, and that is the only thing about those users that has been remotely monetizable.

I see three things: 1) He is flailing. He bit off way more than he can chew, and he has no good plan for making it work. 2) In the course of his flailing, he has done a lot of things that are backfiring on him because his desperate attempts to monetize some things are badly hurting the brand and doing more aggregate harm than good. 3) This actually may not be one of those things: There are two potential benefits, getting rid of annoying bots (which users will like) and generating income for him. It will be bad for him in the long run if it has the opposite effect of making it so that a lot of useful information leaves Twitter and the ones willing to pay for the API are going to clog the service with marketing and crap.