I'm trying to think of what Elon Musk might do with Twitter and why I should care. I'm coming up pretty dry, but let's go through the list.
Conservatives periodically go up in arms over the belief that Twitter has "shadow banned" them. That is to say, Twitter's algorithm has quietly reduced their influence without telling them. Musk will presumably "fix" this and then make the algorithm public, but since the whole shadow banning thing is just a conspiracy theory in the first place, this won't make any difference.
Speaking of the all-powerful algorithm, Musk has promised to make it transparent. Will he? If he does, I don't think it will matter. But I suspect he'll come up with some reason not to.
Musk will let Donald Trump and other banned public figures back on Twitter. Big deal.
Musk has made noises about making Twitter genuinely free of moderation. Anyone will be allowed to say anything they want! But he's going to find out this is harder than it sounds. A true free-for-all will (a) lose users, who just don't want the hassle of being trolled constantly, and (b) lose advertisers, who don't want to be associated with a toxic cesspool. One way or another, Musk, like every other social media owner, is going to have to figure out some compromise between free speech and profitability.
Maybe Musk will create a new paid tier. I have my doubts about this, but Musk is a helluva marketing genius. Maybe he can figure out a way to make it work.
Maybe Musk will add an edit button! Hooray for Elon! That will earn him about five minutes of goodwill before everyone figures out there are downsides to this and starts yelling at Elon to fix the edit button.
Musk also wants to eliminate spam bots, and this is a worthy endeavor that would substantially improve Twitter. The question is, can he do it without mistakenly banning lots of real people too? Nobody else has ever been able to thread this needle.
Maybe Musk will try to compete with TikTok, just like everyone else. This would require him to invest in really great video creation tools to go along with really great monetization tools for creators. Who knows? It could work. But every other social media platform is trying to crack this code too.
Get rid of the blue check? Expand the blue check? There's an astonishing amount of conspiracy theorizing that swirls around the whole blue check phenomenon.
Go back to 140 characters? Expand to 480 characters? Allow blog-length tweets?
Create a client interface that allows you to search for both users and tweets? And also isn't completely lame?
So far, none of these are things I care all that much about, nor are they things that are likely to change Twitter much. However, there's also a wild card. Elon really is a genius, even if he does throw off harebrained idiocies periodically, and he might come up with something completely unforeseen. That is, something that's seemingly unrelated to Twitter as it exists and transforms it into something totally new. Who knows?
What's the genius part, aside from making money? I'm not aware of this guy having ever done anything to benefit anyone other than stockholders. His achievements are a car company of dubious value, a space tourism company for billionaires, and getting a lot of attention for being an emotionally damaged baby-man. Anyway, this has been another chapter in Kevin Drum's current series, "That thing you're worried about? It doesn't matter to me, Kevin Drum".
Take a look at who is excited, and who isn't, by Twitter getting musked.
Trolls and rich libertarians, mostly. I know a couple people with high follower-counts, both said they've seen noticeable drops in their counts. Mayhap that's troll farms running in fear - could happen! - but I kinda think it is people heading for the exits.
So I think that captures the "wisdom of crowds".
What will he do? I dunno. But Mango Mussolini is obviously coming back, I rather suspect that is a significant portion of D00fus' reason for buying it, to do his part to thumb the election scales.
Beyond that, he'll mess around with people, make engineering make some features he personally wants, and probably eventually lose interest, aside from stoned trolling.
Elon is not a genius. He is a self promoter.
But I think he'll have Twitter on the auction block in 2 to 3 years because he is going to have other problems to worry about. Much bigger problems than vanity projects.
To date, Tesla has had the electric vehicle space to itself, but in the 2-3 year time frame it will be flooded with vehicles from companies that know everything there is to know about making cars, things that Musk is still learning.
He has shown a distinct inability to produce anything other than luxury cars for rich people. But Hyundai and Kia already have vehicles with range comparable enough to Tesla and price tags in middle class territory. More are coming. More are also here or coming in Tesla's rich people market space. Tesla is minimally profitable up to now, and it is about to get worse.
In addition, Tesla's stock valuation is almost 40 times higher than any other car maker, but does not have the profitability to justify anything near that value. There is a Tesla bubble that is going to come crashing to the ground eventually, taking much of Musk's fortune with it.
So at that point, Twitter becomes an expensive distraction as no one has ever been able to figure out how to make money off it, and even if Musk can do so, he won't do so in the next couple of years.
Either Musk can hang onto it, and it becomes a sewer of conspiracy theories and porn, the modern MySpace, or he can't hold onto it because his actual money making operations are tanking so he sells it. At a loss.
The algorithm I'd like to see is the one that's been plowing into emergency vehicles.