Perhaps underneath the 420 jokes lies the reality that he's high fairly often.

I am sure the offer price of $54.20 was a joke. With Musk, the appearance of those digits is never an accident.

Wine and Ambien is his goto..

Is it?

Well, if the purpose of buying twitter was to improve the user experience of internet users and advance the doctrine of free speech, then why not just spend that same amount of money building your own twitter (mastodon instance or something) and use your publicity to attract users?

An established social media platform's most valuable asset is the size of its userbase. Even with the reach of Musk, I think it would be hard to attract a large enough userbase to make the product more compelling than Twitter.

An established platform's most valuable asset is the data of the userbase.

Twitter can leverage a huge amount of data about personal preferences, interests, relationship status, political leanings, income, usage profiles, message habits and content, social graph, and location.

If you specifically wanted to clamp down on certain demographics, it would be an excellent way to locate them.

Can't have a large data trove on your users without users. A huge part of a successful social network is sufficient adoption. If the people your users want to follow aren't on the platform they don't have a real reason to be there. It's a major hurdle for any new social platform and a lot fail at that step.

If spending a ton of money was a reliable way to build a new social network we would all be having this conversation on Google+.

"Musk Social"?

The difference would be that musk's following is more moderate, and they might respect peering agreements unlike Gab or Truth Social.

because that doesn't work.

Well maybe he realised that in the best case he would govern over Twitter 2.0 with extra toxicity and in the worst case be the proud owner of another cesspool of assholes, pedophiles and people with violent ideas.

I don't believe for a second that Elon Musk really cares about free speech for anyone but himself and he is right now probably not limited by twitter's policy but by other externalities

Pedophiles? I'm pretty sure they would be forced to take down child porn. I mean, it's a public forum. If you are publicly announcing that you are pedophile or terrorist, that sounds like bad news for you.

In any case, does twitter not already have a lot of "assholes" and people with "violent ideas"?

Yes he would (sorry if I went a bit over the top there).

My point being that I don't trust Elon Musk to make better moderation decisions than whoever is in charge right now.

Past attempts of social media with low barriers of what is allowed have absolutely turned out worse than Twitter if you ask me(e.g. 4chan, 8chan, gab etc) That's why I think the best case is "Twitter but more aligned with whatever Elon Musk thinks at the moment"

This seems to happen with some regularity in Musk's timeline.