Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He’d just let Twitter’s hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it’d be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.

A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn’t shake it. “Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him ‘Maybe I am just stupid?’ But then he violently buries the thought.”

“Stupid?” he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. “I’m a genius.”

He remembered how smart he’d felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.

And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer’s catalog.

And then there was Kanye. “Free Kanye!” he’d declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say “Kim Kardashian for president.”

“Stupid?” he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS’d itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.

There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon’s face, as if he’d just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. “Naaaah,” he laughed, slapping the desk.

He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn’t help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.

“Back to the drawing board,” he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.

Favicon seems to be missing now. Just a heads up! @ruud@lemmy.world

This is the way.

This is my first comment on Lemmy. Fuck you, spez.