Not necessarily. What if the media company was bad for the health of democracy, and the billionaire's incompetence destroys the company's social standing and thus its ability to do more damage (even in the billionaire's own interests)?

Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out. Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were dead?

(Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform. And Twitter imploding without a designated archive will wipe out a tremendous amount of digital history.)

A lot of his decisions look pretty incompetent in the surface, like how could he not see how charging for verification devalue the system to whoever has the money?

Instead it could just be an intentional ploy to completely devalue Twitter disguised as incompetence. He can justify firing employees and charging for API access/verification as money-saving strategies, even if they're terrible strategies that have little chance of succeeding. And he could make enough people believe he's an idiot who makes things up as he goes rather than someone specifically driven or apathetic enough to run Twitter into the ground. Not to mention he was forced to buy them after changing his mind. Almost feels like a "so that's what happens" response.

I wonder how higher powers would be able to distinguish fake incompetence from real incompetence. Would they care how Twitter as a private company ends up if it's the case that it implodes from its own legitimately bad business decisions? It reminds me of how employers won't directly fire employees for discriminatory reasons, instead they make the employees' lives miserable so they're compelled to leave on their own, thus they escape scrutiny.

This is basically at the level of "9/11 was an inside job to bring down WTC 1, but WTC2 was destroyed in an unrelated but simultaneous terrorist attack"

> Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out. Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were dead?

> (Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform.

If there's not an obvious successor, right when its shutdown, a lot of those people might get their habit broken and find something better to do. I know Mastodon was held up as a successor, but it's unclear to me if that's actually capable of scaling to that level.

Mastodon is way too flawed to be anything but a niche tool for tech people and activists. I highly highly doubt such a system can cross the chasm. That doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing though.

Or, he’s as incompetent as he looks.

i wasnt referring to him buying twitter, i was referring to him saying he was going to open source the recommendation engine and then doing it.

i agree billionaires owning media companies is huge problem

Which is why HN was so incensed about Bezos buying the Washington Post.

Do you believe billionaires can do good? Is their existence an existential threat to democracy?

We need more inequality. It’s a feature, not a bug. Entire swaths of people are convinced we need to flatten all people into one income bracket. That’s not going to end well. See USSR and Cambodian massacre.

That doesn’t mean we should propel poverty.

Midwits have been brainwashed into thinking “equity = good” with no critical thinking capability. The entire political college class screams “How can you be against equality!” followed by insinuations and fascism insults. The term “human rights” have been hijacked into socialism/communism propaganda.

It’s so deeply fucked.

Yes. There are plenty of philanthropic billionaires. Yes. That much money buys a destabilizing amount of influence.

Billionaires are billionaires not by literally storing cash. The rest of the society values their contributions and creations in the companies/corporations they run. Sure, they have some liquidity but the entire concept of resentment towards billionaires is essentially equal to resentment for the betterment of the world. There are some exceptions but for the most part, in a well oiled market, you can't just become a billionaire by fucking over people. See Adani and how it turns out for him: https://www.ft.com/content/5c0b6174-e66d-4fa5-89a5-6da1d69ab...

Can you name one relevant media company owned by someone from the working class?

If you personally own a media company, you are by definition bourgeoisie. But see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cooperative#List_of_medi...

And when a highly scrutinised, highly visible billionaire buys it off a different bunch of billionaires which you know little about?

Every major media company is owned by a billionaire