Elon Musk's Twitter takeover is a disaster. How much longer will the platform hold?

There are few guarantees in this life. But, this I know: There will be death, taxes, and the not-so-infrequent Elon Musk shit-post. 

Having fired four senior executives and dissolved its board of directors, and now laying off thousands of employees, Twitter's new owner, chief executive and now sole director hasn't exactly been a study in stability. After spending months trying to scuttle the $44 billion deal to acquire the social media giant and within days of frog-marching CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal out of the building presumably without their pre-negotiated, multi-billion dollar payouts, Musk returned to his favorite pastime — trolling.

A mere 72 hours after he strolled into Twitter HQ and pronounced himself "Chief Twit," the billionaire posted a tweet that advanced baseless allegations about the recent home invasion and hammer attack on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye" when it comes to the attempted murder of 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, he said less than dutifully. His cultists were alight in glee. The facts poking us all in the eye is that the assailant was a right-wing conspiracy-addled QAnon adherent, who had never met his victim and was actively targeting the Speaker for a not-so-friendly kneecapping if she didn't cop to rigging the 2020 election and other flavors of ridiculousness. 

But common decency be damned. Gotta get these jokes off, amirite? 

In the end, the joke appears to be on Musk who paid nearly double the company's value to take it private in a gambit to control the world's largest public square. Promising to make it profitable, not to mention $1 billion now due to investors annually, Musk is scrambling for ideas. Among them are monetizing video, verification and direct messaging. None of those efforts will bring the kind of revenue necessary to save the platform. And now, after an uptick in racist and antisemitic vitriol, advertisers and users are running for the exits. 

Two years after Jack Dorsey launched Twitter, to the chagrin of my children and I am sure generations to come, I logged onto the online communications app and snagged a username. Luckily, aside from the several who likely regret sharing a name with a foul-mouthed, prone-to-fisticuffs, progressive firebrand and Ina Garten groupie like myself, there aren't many Goldie Taylors in the world. At the time, in 2008, the system was home to around 300,000 posts per day. My opening salvo was akin to shouting "hey y'all" during Super Bowl half-time. Now, some 14 years later, I've contributed several hundred thousand tweets about everything from F1 racing and the vagaries of beltway politics to the glories of home-pulled pasta and my unrequited adoration for Larry Wilmore. 

Along the way, I picked up an exalted blue check for the low, low price of free-99 and — almost as inexplicable as my taste in men — a little over 170,000 follows, which is less of an accomplishment than it is evidence of an obsession with information and a platform on which to work out my political machinations in public. I've had a lot to say about a lot of things, some of which were not always entirely welcomed by my minders at cable news networks that once employed or booked me. I've been wrong about some things and, at least in my estimation, right about a lot more. Let's just say I've never met a proverbial prisoner worthy of a cell, so I took none. I've engaged in brickbats with troll farms and tilled a bit of soil myself, unleashing quips on political ne'er-do-wells from sunup to sundown and sometimes beyond. I'm nobody's snowflake and politics ain't beanbag, but I have been threatened, doxxed and rendered all but helpless as anonymous users went after my children and posted screenshots of my home and office.

Like most people who engage in such things, and I assume like Musk, I simply wanted my voice to matter. Finding community and disagreement in a space in which talking to strangers might be more welcome than at, say, my local coffee shop is particularly alluring peregrination. After all, the nice lady who runs the dry-cleaning operation down the way from my house doesn't want to hear my latest hot take and is impervious to the hour's trending topics. She is unfamiliar with "doomscrolling" and her life, I'm willing to bet, is all the better for it. 

Now, a dozen-odd years and miles of self-deprecating asides, food porn, policy jousts, throwback pics and acts of linguistic jiu-jitsu later, it appears I may need to find another outlet for my diatribes — comedic, insightful, delicious, churlish or otherwise. It wouldn't be the first time I weighed leaving Twitter. However, something about this moment feels different. 

Musk, shit-posting and compensation raiding aside, can be forgiven for not knowing how to manage this particular kind of business, one in which his only experience is as a user (I am a proud Delta frequent flier, but ain't nobody about to let me pilot a passenger jet) and even for his soon-to-be failed attempts to cut his way to profitability. The platform, according to some now former employees, is "built on sticks," reported NBC News correspondent Ben Collins, and could literally "fall down." 

The moderation team has been nearly obliterated ahead of a plan to monetize verification in a way that is sure to give rise to imposters. It will open up direct messaging to celebrities, politicians, journalists and others to anybody willing to fork over eight bucks. And video? Think porn hub. 

Twitter has a history of complicated relationships with demonstrably bad actors, but if Musk's latest screeds and corporate decisions are any indications, the self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" intends to create the very "hellscape" he claims to eschew. Taking the company private with no oversight beyond Musk's proclivity of the day has already made it more prone to vitriol and hate speech. The targeted racist attacks and disinformation ramped up within minutes of the announcement. There is even the potential of reversing the ban on former President Donald Trump whose well-documented track record for ginning up violence is in plain view.

"Not taking an absolute stand against political violence signals to deranged people that there is no moral standard against that violence, that we are just floating along on a vast sea of carnage that is indiscriminate and random and there's nothing anyone can do about it, so go ahead, fire away," my friend Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic.

Is it then reasonable for me to worry about the future of the platform in the hands of a man whose seemingly only devotion is to his own checkbook, who is flinging open the proverbial gates to the Barbarians? Well, yes. Am I willing to fork over $240 (or any money) a year to keep my verified account in hopes that the already weak safety protocols will hold up? Hell to the nawl.

Ultimately, the jury is still out for me. But, at least for now, I've put my account on hiatus. As long as Musk inhabits the corner office, I may never return.