Musk's entire publicly stated justification for purchasing Twitter was doing better than the status quo. He harped for months about Twitter as a public service, the importance of transparency in moderation, made extraordinary claims about Twitter falsifying its ad and engagement numbers, and so forth.
"He can't be worse" is simply not the point. His stated goal was to be better; we've seen no earnest attempt to do so (and plenty of earnest attempts at value extraction).
Sure, we have. We've seen him charge an earnest fee for a premium service that Twitter previously withheld behind a mysterious bureaucracy that arbitrarily decided who did and did not get a blue check mark. We found that employees at Twitter were charging as much as $15K to pull strings for people for that blue check.
That's already objectively better. $8 a month to verify you are who you represent yourself to be and to get less ads, more access to revenue generation features from your audience, etc? Sounds fine. It's absurd to have some mysterious service that no one really knows the rules or thresholds for. It creates the very pay for play schemes that were the status quo.
The stock market did think Twitter was worth that much a year ago (Q2 2021 mcap was $51B). Of course the entire stock market shed trillions in market cap this year as the Fed relentlessly hiked rates. Musk clearly was trying to get a steeper discount factoring for the macro environment after the original offer, but it didn't work out. Can't say I blame him, if you can stall things in court to get an extra 10-20% discount from a $40B purchase like that, it's worth a shot.
When you offer to buy up an entire company and all the liquid shares on the market, you have to pay a premium. That's always the case for any buyout. For a while it looked like Musk was going to get away with walking away from the deal. That's why the market walked away from "free money".
The media's job is to dramatize everything. Especially when it's the drama machine itself, Twitter, at the center of it all. The media will do everything in its power to portray the Twitter purchase as chaotic, haphazard, unplanned, ill-considered, etc, because their own engagement metrics are driven by such takes.
At any rate I repeat my assertion that no worse can be done by Musk that has not already been done by Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Google, et al. There's little to exploit there that hasn't already been exploited. Perhaps his subscription revenue ploy will work and he'll monetize with micropayments and other integrations. I hope so. I think there's a chance that version of Twitter is healthier than the ad and blue check insider peddling platform that has existed. Not guaranteed but it's a chance.