North Korea is under heavy sanctions and is thus a poor choice.

But if France put a bid on twitter, they would be forced to entertain the offer.

If the China Investment Corporation offered $60 billion to take Twitter private would Twitter be forced to entertain the offer?

China is not under sanctions, but the odds are excellent that the US government would flip out and prohibit Twitter from selling.

No, but only because you chose North Korea.

They certainly had no problem with selling to Saudi Arabia.

North Korea is under economic sanctions by USA. Your hypothetical is stupid for a whole bunch of reasons.

Indeed, what happens when Elon starts his own platform instead and uses some of the ~$40 billion he'd otherwise buy Twitter with instead on paying top users of Twitter to exclusively use his platform instead?

> what happens when Elon starts his own platform

He wouldn't bother because it'd be a failure. Twitter's tech stack isn't worth 40 billion, Musk could clone twitter for less than $500m, but just having a platform doesn't accomplish much, the overwhelming majority of twitter users have no reason to leave twitter.

Parler didn't fail because it was unable to attract a userbase.

Parler failed because it was never actually able to do and be what the incoming user base thought they were promised —- a free, uncensored bastion. Since that would never work at a bigger size with mainstream attention, there’s no real diff. Parler being a grift makes it all muddied any how.

That is why it failed - technical mistakes aside.

I bet there would be a whole lot of people that would join elon-twitter.

They said the same thing about truth social.

I'd ditch twtr in a heartbeat, at this point it's a cesspool in every sense.

There are already alternatives to Twitter. Why haven't you ditched it already?

I'm aware, and do you realize nobody of note is using the alternatives? Why would you recommend someone invest time building a presence in yet another loser platform with bleak future prospects? Doesn't seem helpful or all that bright.

For a real alternative to succeed, solid backers focused on dethroning tw are needed to inspire confidence and stability, then we all need to jump at about the same time to get the momentum going and bounce out of the twatterverse.

As it stands now, there is no real competition.

> I'm aware, and do you realize nobody of note is using the alternatives?

That's exactly the point - there is no reason to believe this would change if Musk created his own social network.

I'd be willing to give it a shot if it's backed by $$$ and a progressive technologist.

Your two comments show you’re the perfect audience and user for an Elon social platform. Every failed or failing Twitter esque platform has some number of perfect audience fits. The problem is that those aren’t enough users. There is no reason to believe an Elon venture would fare markedly better.

The amount of users who once used twitter minus still use twitter is greater than current twitter users. You could build off of everyone rejecting twitter.

Most people who have “rejected” Twitter did not do so because of Twitter issues but wanting micro blogging sort of social platform.

Most rejected the overall concept. The amt of users that stil want something similar but not Twitter AND who will be appeased by whatever alt Twitter is made is an even smaller number.

That only makes sense if everyone who stopped using Twitter is some kind of united cohort. Many people were simply not interested in the format, didn't find content that cared about, didn't have friends using it, drifted off to other social networks etc. Good luck gathering all of these people together on a new platform.

Do you remember Google Plus? Google had excellent financing and an existing team of excellent software developers and couldn't pull of a credible alternative to facebook.

The world is littered with the expensive corpses of failed software.

Much of Facebook could be cloned by many startups see VK.

Google's product lacked purpose. It died because of a lack of vision and leadership and product mistakes (real names).

It died prematurely. Google treated the product like a pilot a network threw on the first week of September. It had solid numbers and given time it could have found itself if it found a backer in leadership.

What would happen is that it would almost certainly fail to make any impact.