> I promise you, we don't need bad people to lead technological progress. We could have good people...

Where are they?

EM (as far as i know) didn't crash and burn other EV startups or rocket companies.

He wouldn't necessarily have to (but I also don't know whether he did or didn't). I already explained, assholes have a competitive advantage because they don't worry about consequences and externalities. It's the same reason many corporate regulations exist, to even the playing field among ethical and unethical actors.

There is also a perspective that the worryingly popular ‘silence all dissent’ mentality is vastly more of a threat to democracy than anything Elon has done.

> silence all dissent

Who are you talking about? I'm talking about the guy who declared "cis" is a slur and promised to ban people for saying it on his private free speech platform.

Yes and now Twitter is filled with hate speech, porn bots, crypto scams, misinfo, compelling and difficult to disprove conspiracies. I'm glad that stuff is no longer being silenced.

What do you mean "now"? Did it use to be a clean and pure space?

Yes, when it was new and had practically no users :)

It used to have more moderation definitely.

The moderation simply switched political sides. My experience in centrist, topic-focused X is identical save for the logo.