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While I don't share the general admiration for Elon Musk, I have to admit, I think this is funny.
I don't know if Americans/non-British English speakers will quite get the joke about "Chief Twit" and it certainly seems a lot more self-aware than Musk has previously shown himself to be.
But I do find myself in need of The Idiot's Guide To What Is Going On Here. First, Musk said he would buy Twitter, and that was so terrible it had to be fought at all costs. Then he backed out, or tried to, and that was also so terrible that he needed to be forced to go through with it. Now it looks like the deal is back on, and this is now terrible again (possibly because he said he'd sack 75% of the workforce, which I don't believe is serious but has a lot of knickers in a twist).
So - good, bad, terrible, meh that he is (seemingly) going to buy Twitter?
So the whole raison d'etre of writing journalists is the ability to express themselves with brevity in text. It is not a suprise that the social media platform that is built for the ability for brevity in text(140/280 characters) like writing journalist they feel that it is their space. Any perceived threat to their power like Elon Musk buying Twitter is something they are willing to put in a bad light. And when Elon tried to pull out(or get a price adjustment of some of the people think) it was still a threat to the perceived power of the journalist that there is a disproportional amount of "fake" users there and the image that journalist have of Twitter of as a center of cultural and political power, that is another issue that they want to adjust the optics on. Elon stated to the employees at while visiting the twitter HQ that he doesn't know where the 75% sacking comes from! So maybe there is a lie there somewhere and it is either Elon that actually said it and it was truthfully reported or there is an anonymous source who is lying, possibly even made up by fear-mongering journalist. Because almost everything we know about this deal is through the journalist lens to adjust the optics to keep them in power in their favorite social media platform.
So in my view it has very little to do with the politics or social panics du jour, but everything with who the actual power brokers are on Twitter namely journalists.
The original source appears to just be cited as "interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post". And even the denial is just from "people, who declined to be named because the information isn’t public."
I doubt there's any outright lie from either direct source, actually (is someone going to forge documents just to start a brief spicy rumor? is someone going to lie about the contents of an address that had thousands of witnesses?), but I wouldn't be surprised if something was twisted way out of proportion, like "fire 75%" was an interpretation of "here's how we could avoid prolonged downtime with only 25% of staff under contingency plan D if economic crisis scenario 3 occurs" and that got turned into "pink slip printers go brrrrr on Monday!", and/or "denied the previously reported number" was in some weasel-worded phrasing that would be technically accurate if only 74% got fired but the oversimplified version of that is "ha ha don't believe Bezos' rag's lies!" so that's what we're expected to take away from any paraphrased report.
Somewhere in the space of pure fabrication and twisting a verifiable fact to suit a narrative the truth ends and the lie starts. Is that splitting hairs and arguing semantics? Point still stands journalists that are drunk on their clout of their chosen echo chamber has the motive to outright lie and/or twist facts. Feel free to dismiss my analysis totally if you think it hinges on this claim. But my opinion on the matter is formed on the whole foreplay for the court case and found that the flexible relation with the truth that the journalists had. My conclusion is simple journalists feel that they have skin in the game with the Twitter deal and bias their reporting around it.
Just to point it out, I don't like Elon Musk, Twitter and Journalists either so I could be a bit biased. I couldn't care less what the outcome of this whole thing.
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