I don't believe it's climbing in the real sense. I think people like watching disasters unfold, they are taking to their Twitter feed to see news of its fast moving downfall. Refreshing to see what the next ridiculous move is, and getting that dopamine hit when it happens. It's not sustainable growth.

Basically. Lots of people hate Musk. Lots of Twitter blue-checks hate Musk. This is an attempt to capitalize on this hate and come up with yet another platform that would be identical to all the other platforms.

By what metric is it climbing? DAU's? Signups? People exporting all their data?

Musk has no incentive to be truthful here anyway. He's in the middle of what could end up being one of the most embarrassing failures the last 50 years. Destroying a 44 billion dollar business in 3 weeks through sheer, unadulterated hubris and incompetence. There's nothing people love more than watching people fall from grace so I have a feeling that folks will remember this.

People are reporting twitter has retained less than 10% of pre-Elon employees now.

Certainly plausible that twitter could survive without significant downtime, but it seems unlikely at this point: it appears Elon has been taking big reckless actions and he'll need to rapidly pivot to smart measured actions to keep infrastructure from tipping over.

> Is the general assumption that Musk is ruining or wrecking Twitter accurate?

If it weren't true, why would there be a hundred articles a day about it, and a US President announcing in a press conference that Musk's connections to foreign governments should be investigated?

>Twitter usage apparently climbing,

Over what timeframe? If only recently, are people joining just to rip the piss, and play with the muskovites?

There are people who are happy to use products that benefit Elon Musk, and reward his behavior.

There are others who want to avoid his product because they don't approve of his behavior.

Idk if you’re an engineer or not but there’s an aspect of “reading the room” that your comment fails to capture. You can take the superficial tweets on usage for what they are but there are larger things happening around those specific statements that would lend themselves to “Twitter is actually dying this time.”