Very few things could improve my life as quickly as the destruction of Twitter, which is why I was so glad when, in the spring through autumn of 2022, businessman Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.

He then proceeded to make a number of changes that have, in the near-ubiquitous opinion of power users of Twitter, made the product worse. He fired some 80% of the workforce. He worked with a set of contentious journalists to audit internal files and the communications of the prior management vis a vis the way it had worked along with the U.S. government to surveil and censor public communications around COVID-19 and lockdowns, Hunter Biden, and the banning of Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C. He changed the name of the service to just X, which led to a lawsuit from another company already called that. (He apparently hadn’t bothered to check.)