Elon Musk takes over Twitter

That just isn't true. Tesla and Space X are stand alone companies. Even if he wanted to fold Tesla into a holding company. ... it's not his to do it with. The company is publicly traded. He is the majority sharedholder, but not the only shareholder.

X Corp. is new. He just registered it a month or two ago. So far its only holding is Twitter.

 

Yup.

None of this has anything to do with speech or public squares.

It has everything to do with him being tens of billions of dollars in to something that is objectively worth less than half of what he paid for it, and the leveraged financing he used to make the purchase putting him on the clock to find a way to earn way more money than the business as it existed ever earned. He's got to make his nut soon on the loans.

He has no idea how to earn turn the business into something that earns way more money than it ever has, so he is desperately trying to monetize things. ... he aggressively cut expenses, sold everything that wasn't bolted down. ... and attempted to drive subscriptions via the checkmark scheme.

Unfortunately for him, people don't subscribe to things unless there is a value proposition for them, and that checkmark / prioritization isn't that valuable to most people who use Twitter. It was kind of predictable, but not to him.

Then add in that he has been such an unlikeable douche that he somehow managed to turn the checkmark into something that now has a negative stigma, and he not only isn't monetizing anything, he's hurt the brand badly and lost some of the revenue the company used to have.