In a matter of days, he's fired the board of directors, installed himself as CEO, and made a string of increasingly chaotic product decisions.

He's talked about relaunching Vine.

He's talked about establishing a new oversight board for moderation decisions.

The biggest new project is getting all the verified accounts to pay 8 dollars a month for their blue check, and if the engineers can't ship an update in the next week, they're fired.

Looming over everything is the threat of massive layoffs, touching nearly every part of the company.

Whatever happens, this is gonna have a huge and lasting impact on what it's like to use Twitter.

So, what is Elon Musk's version of Twitter actually gonna look like?

Twitter was part of the first wave of social media companies, founded just one year after YouTube and two years after Facebook.

But where those two became billion-dollar businesses, Twitter has really struggled.

Lots of people use the platform, but as a business, it's inconsistent at best, struggling for profitability through a rotating cast of CEOs.

As Mark Zuckerberg put it, "It was like they drove a clown car into a gold mine."

As of last quarter, Facebook has about 10 times more users and makes 10 times more money than Twitter.

From April to June, Facebook made a profit of 8.4 billion dollars and Twitter lost 344 million dollars.

That's a lot of money to lose in three months.

And after 15 years of fitful profitability, Twitter was looking at a very real possibility that the company would just run out of money.

Into that mess steps Elon Musk.

Even as Twitter was failing as a business, it had become really influential with a core set of users, particularly people who work in the media.

So, when Twitter made controversial moderation calls, like banning Trump or blocking a "New York Post" article, it could have a huge overall effect.

As Elon became more prominent on Twitter, he also became more prickly about the platform's moderation choices.

And unlike basically every other person on Earth, he was in a position to raise tens of billions of dollars just to buy the thing.

This is not a way to sort of make money, you know.

Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.

I don't care about the economics at all.

So, in theory, this approach could work.

Whatever you think of him, Elon Musk has a long history of running mission-driven companies, and if you squint a little, you can imagine Twitter being run the same way.

But basically everything Elon has done since he made this offer has made the deal seem like a slow-motion disaster.

After charging in hard with the 44-billion-dollar offer, he spent most of the year trying to weasel out of the deal because of some pretty specious claims about bot activity,

eventually caving once Twitter took him to court.

Now Elon really owns Twitter.

He's made himself CEO and he can do whatever he wants, but mostly, what he seems to want to do is make life difficult for the people who actually work there.

You can argue some of this makes sense.

Twitter really does need to reduce its costs, and the whole reason Elon bought it in the first place was because he thought they were doing a bad job.

But the fact that it's happening so quickly and haphazardly raises the real possibility that there just won't be anyone left to keep the platform running.

Twitter's reputation as social media's ugly duckling also works against it here.

Anyone with the skills to really help Twitter succeed could make a lot more money at Facebook or YouTube, and they wouldn't have to deal with working for Elon.

At a company like SpaceX or Tesla, you might stick around because you really care about electric cars or private space flight.

But, at this point, it's hard to imagine anyone really feeling that way about Twitter.

Then there's Musk's view of free speech.

His basic idea is that Twitter should do less moderation, which is a reasonable enough idea,

but in practice, it's meant gutting Twitter's trust and safety team at the same time that the platform is seeing a huge surge in tweets using racial slurs.

Whatever you think about the abstract ideas in play, this is not gonna tempt in any new users or advertisers.

What's left looks an awful lot like a death spiral,

where staff chaos creates user experience problems, which leads to fewer users and less money, which leads to more staff chaos and more platform issues.

For all Elon's experience, he's never run a social network before, and he's not gonna have a lot of runway to turn Twitter around.

If he really can't, he may have just bought a 44-billion-dollar trash fire.

Thanks for watching.

It's been a busy week of updates, but you can catch it all on theverge.com.

- Sweet. - That was great.

Did you like the point? That was, like⏤that's what... that's what gets me.