That's what you do when you sober up and realize what a mess you've made.
I don't believe for a second that Elon Musk really cares about free speech for anyone but himself and he is right now probably not limited by twitter's policy but by other externalities
In any case, does twitter not already have a lot of "assholes" and people with "violent ideas"?
My point being that I don't trust Elon Musk to make better moderation decisions than whoever is in charge right now.
Past attempts of social media with low barriers of what is allowed have absolutely turned out worse than Twitter if you ask me(e.g. 4chan, 8chan, gab etc) That's why I think the best case is "Twitter but more aligned with whatever Elon Musk thinks at the moment"
Twitter can leverage a huge amount of data about personal preferences, interests, relationship status, political leanings, income, usage profiles, message habits and content, social graph, and location.
If you specifically wanted to clamp down on certain demographics, it would be an excellent way to locate them.
I am sure the offer price of $54.20 was a joke. With Musk, the appearance of those digits is never an accident.
I'm just saying what if... gasp... he simply did something foolish? The blame-it-on-the-bipolar out reinforces the narrative of an infallible person who only make mistakes because of a medical condition. Take that line of thinking one step further and you are now fully onboard the bipolar stigma train.
He spent days/weeks/months on setting up this deal, he became obsessed with it at some point.
(Hopefully) no one is "blaming" it on the bipolar. It's simply something consistent with bipolar. (But it's also consistent with rich people getting obsessed with something and then spending way too much resources on it.)
> reinforces the narrative
That narrative is simply bad and pushed by people who have no idea what they are talking about. Musk's previous instances of risk taking (that "all" turned out to be fine) is also perfectly consistent with bipolar. (Of course if you look at it then it turns out that he took many risks that made very little sense, like when he talked about taking Tesla private, the infamous funding secured tweet.)
And of course just a label like bipolar means (almost) nothing, these spectrum disorders are complex (and there are usually other comorbidities at the same time, just with different severity), we don't know how he is treating/medicating/managing it, or is it even the right diagnosis or not. Or he could have simply lied.
It's also consistent with making a mistake.
and of course we all hear about the top of the Forbes billionaire list mistakes, the wework scandal and the other questionable decisions of Masayoshi Son, how "the crazier someone it's more likely they get money from Thiel", etc.
but even on top of all these this one easily takes the cake.
yes, in isolation it's a "mistake", but luckily we have plenty of context for it.
So then you agree that it being a mistake is entirely plausible and that it having anything to do with being bipolar is pure speculation?
It's a very costly and stubborn mistake either way and he has (or hasn't) bipolar either way.
Even in the most severe substance dependence cases some people can override their short term wants (eg. they don't go and mug people to get money for their next fix), while there's a clear pattern of this behavior in others. (But it's what we expect, since we define one by the other.) So in both of those instances, it was their mental state, but was it the altered part or the underlying base state that let the dependence to form in the first part? It's really not separable.
One explains the other, but there's no direction, no proximate causal relationship. At best there is some predictive power, ie. if someone goes off their meds, or stressors increase they will show behavior consistent with this or that. (But in general everyone will make more mistakes when they have more stress in their life. Who would have guessed, I know.)
Yet these categories (diagnoses) are not useless. They communicate behavior patterns, things to look for, things to be mindful of and try to manage.