I don’t think it’s the libs being owned here

I know we’ve been discussing this a lot, but Elon Musk’s impulsive decision to buy Twitter for more than twice its market value because he was upset that a painfully unfunny winger satire site got a brief suspension for a transphobic “joke” and then quickly drive it straight into the ground with a bunch of half-baked (or, come to think of it in his case, extremely baked) ideas is a tale of hubris and incompetence so comprehensive no novelist could come up with it:

At Goldbird, Twitter’s revenue division, the company had to bring back those who ran key money-generating products that “no one else knows how to operate,” people with knowledge of the business said. One manager agreed to try rehiring some laid-off workers, but expressed concerns that they were “weak, lazy, unmotivated and they may even be against an Elon Twitter,” two people familiar with the matter said.

On Monday, some Twitter employees arrived at work to find that certain systems they had relied on no longer worked. In San Francisco, an engineer discovered that some contracts with vendors that provide software for managing user data had been put on hold or had expired, and that the managers and executives who could fix the problem had been laid off or resigned.

On Wednesday, workers in Twitter’s New York office were unable to use the Wi-Fi after a server room overheated and knocked it offline, two people said.

Mr. Musk plans to begin making employees pay for lunch — which had been free — at the company cafeteria, two people said.

nside Twitter, some employees have clashed with Mr. Musk’s advisers.

This week, security executives disagreed with Mr. Musk’s team over how Twitter should meet its obligations to the Federal Trade Commission. Twitter had agreed to a settlement with the F.T.C. in 2011 over privacy violations, which requires the company to submit regular reports about its privacy practices and open its doors to audits.

On Wednesday, a day before a deadline for Twitter to submit a report to the F.T.C., Twitter’s chief information security officer, Lea Kissner; chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran; and chief compliance officer, Marianne Fogarty, resigned.

In internal messages later that day, an employee wrote about the resignations and suggested that internal privacy reviews of Twitter’s products were not proceeding as they should under the F.T.C. settlement.

Some engineers could be required to “self-certify” that their projects complied with the settlement, rather than relying on reviews from lawyers and executives, a shift that could lead to “major incidents,” the employee wrote.

I must admit that these excerpts are arbitrary, because pretty much every graf of this excellent story is like this. And it doesn’t even fully get into, for example, his aborted plan that allowed anyone to imitate his advertisers with an emoji indicating that their account is authentic for $8 while also firing most of the staff tasked with account verification. There are going to be some great books about this.