Right away, social media was not happy and plenty threatened to leave Twitter.
“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter,” Musk tweeted at the time, “because that is what free speech means.”
But one man in St. Louis seemed not only to be happy about the deal, but maybe in a bit of man love with the guy behind it. Yes, our very own bearded holy man Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter and now CEO of Block (formerly Square), seemed to be positively thrilled about the potential takeover. He and Musk had been Tweeting sweet missives at each other for years. Gross.
There’s countless examples of the men’s bromance stretching back to 2016, from Dorsey praising Musk’s use of Twitter and saying that he wanted Musk to join the Twitter board to Musk complimenting Dorsey’s self-styled Square title, Block Head.Just want say that I support @Jack as Twitter CEO. He has a good ❤️.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 3, 2020
It was enough to make anyone question Dorsey’s sanity and taste. But we’ve massively buried the lede here because news yesterday made it abundantly clear that Dorsey was playing the longest con ever.
Yesterday, Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative Bluesky (pronounced Blue Sky) dropped into the Android store (it had already been on Apple’s platform) as an invite-only beta test, and everyone who has been bitching on Twitter about Twitter for the last year got super excited and said they were going to leave Twitter, like for real this time. Some notable luminaries, like Dril and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, shared their new Bluesky profiles … on Twitter.
Bluesky is supposed to be different from all the other Twitter competitors that have popped up in the last few years in that people might actually want to use it. In an October blog post, Bluesky described itself as a “new federated social network. It integrates ideas from the latest decentralized technologies into a simple, fast, and open network.”
Honestly, we don’t know what that all means. But The Washington Post described it as a doppelganger, writing it is “the first to come close to striking Twitter’s offbeat tone.”
In reality, the thing that seems to make Bluesky different from other would-be Twitter replacements is that people who already made a successful social media platform also made Bluesky. And one of those people is Dorsey, a man who egged on an egotistical zillionaire to buy the platform he’d built.
Dorsey surely understood how much Twitter users would hate Musk as owner and CEO and having him installed thus would make people want to leave. But did he also suspect that Musk would tank the company, making it even more likely said people would want to leave, and seek out a new social media platform while they're at it?
We suspect the answer is yes. This really feels like the moment in a whodunit mystery where the detective explains everything and you, dear reader, never saw it coming.
Email the author at [email protected]
Coming soon: Riverfront Times Daily newsletter. We’ll send you a handful of interesting St. Louis stories every morning. Subscribe now to not miss a thing.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
