• by Todd Wasserman , Staff Writer, November 3, 2022

Now that Elon Musk owns Twitter, it’s useful to explore what he might do with it. Here are some possibilities:

He bought it to destroy it.  Considering Musk’s net worth ($223.2 billion) compared to Twitter’s ($41 billion), it’s fair to consider that Musk is willing to take some wild chances with Twitter because his net worth doesn’t depend on it.

Edward Niedermeyer, a Musk critic and author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors,” told Yahoo News that Musk may have taken on too much.

 “He’s like a guy who’s been at the casino for like all night long on [a] hot hand,” Niedermeyer said. “He keeps rolling.”

He wants to turn it into an “everything app.” Musk tweeted on Oct. 4 that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Musk didn’t say, but the model for an everything app is WeChat, China’s everything app. People in China use WeChat for everything from reading the news to hailing a cab and to pay taxes.

In a town hall with Twitter staff in June, Musk said that WeChat is a “great, great app," but not everyone agrees. As TechCrunch noted, a super app might bring convenience, but “the model can stifle competition and rule out user choices.”

But it’s worth noting that Twitter has entrenched rivals like WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram and others.

He took on too much. It’s worth remembering why Musk has bought Twitter. It wasn’t so much that he loved the app as much as because he was about to lose Twitter’s lawsuit to force him to buy it. To manage Twitter successfully, Musk will have to excel at content moderation and make Twitter absurdly profitable. Both missions seem far out of reach, even for the richest man in the world.