@mathlover Probably so. I mean, they trust Tesla cars with their lives and their children's lives, and SpaceX with their lunar rendezvous missions.

@radehi *Some* people trust Tesla cars with their lives and their children's lives, but fair point...though I'm not sure as many will trust him with money going forward given Musk's handling of Twitter.

@mathlover Yeah, could be a big disaster for his reputation if goes badly enough. So far I haven't seen a failwhale or evidence of a drop in engagement, though, and is hard to imagine what non-operations problem would be worse than what Twitter already did before he bought it, like getting Trump elected president of the USA.

Advertisers do seem to be staying away, and that may be one reason he wants to move Twitter into more lucrative services like money transmission.

@radehi I'm still expecting a failwhale --- or more likely an error page --- before the end of the year.
I also just don't see Twitter becoming the Muskian version of WeChat that he wants it to be. My impression is that WeChat's growth probably involved a heavy amount of both CCP involvement and outright corruption. Musk wouldn't be able to get Twitter *that* level of favoritism in the US even if he were 100% competent.

@mathlover Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see failwhales, maybe even for several days running. But remember that failwhales were common ten years ago, and Twitter kept growing. What fraction of Twitter's quarter billion users will abandon it forever if goes failwhale for a solid week in December? Surely less than half.

I think Musk's objective with Twitter is, as he declared in the TED interview, not financial. He'd previously declared an intention to start up his own press enterprise to compensate for what he saw as the bias of existing USA press outlets. (That's when the USA press started really going after him.)

Eventually he didn't have to start his own press enterprise; bought Twitter instead. Is Musk's tool for reshaping discourse in his favor. That will still work with only 100 million or 50 million users. Of course, better if doesn't lose too much money, but controlling memespace is key to controlling outer space.