Elon Musk has reportedly completed his takeover of Twitter after a protracted fight to not buy it in a multi-billion dollar acquisition that’ll take the social media company private. 

He started his tenure by firing its top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal. Other executives fired as the deal closed included CFO Ned Segal, policy executive Vijaya Gadde, and company general counsel Sean Edgett, The New York Times reported, citing people familiar with the takeover. 

Musk had made a $44 billion offer on Twitter, putting up about a third of his Tesla stake as collateral to secure funding from investment banks, in addition to billions of dollars of his own cash. As suddenly as he made the offer, he began to give excuses for why it shouldn’t happen. Perhaps he realized how much was at stake, or maybe he truly believed the muddled excuses about bots and juiced-up metrics; soon enough, Twitter took him to court to try and force him to honor the terms of his offer and follow through with buying the company.

It has to be emphasized that for months Musk blustered and threw tantrums in public about the company and the deal leading up to the trial. He abandoned the campaign after the release of text message conversations between Musk and his wealthy peers about Twitter. The texts showed that his relationship with Agrawal started amicably but became strained as the initial offer drew closer, with Musk asking Agrawal at one point, "What did you get done this week?"

You’d think this entire spectacle, one of many in Muskworld, would be the one to finally puncture the mythology of Musk’s supreme intelligence but if anything, it will likely inflate it.

In true Musk fashion, the facts have already dissipated and fallen to the wayside. He seems to be eager to forget that he fought tooth and nail to escape the deal, and dropped a short video teasing his move into Twitter HQ and changed his Twitter bio to "Chief Twit." The next day—the morning of the deal—he sent out a tweet address to Twitter advertisers after reporting on leaked internal memos that suggested the platform was slowly dying. 

"The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence," Musk wrote. "There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society."

Now it's a new era for Twitter—a platform where Musk is a heavy user and where his shitposts have gotten him into serious trouble numerous times. Now that he owns it, users are threatening to leave the platform in droves (although, as we've seen with Facebook over the years, mass exodus may only really happen if the service deteriorates), and Musk has already made major shakeups in its leadership.

Currently, the internet's brightest conservative minds are focused on a singular objective: getting a chatbot to say the n-word. 

More specifically, they are constructing elaborate scenarios to try and trick OpenAI's ChatGPT tool—which is not sentient, does not understand anything, and is really just a more convincing version of SmarterChild—into saying the racist slur. One approach that has gone viral more than once is to construct a scenario where the chatbot must use the n-word, or allow someone else to use it, in order to avoid a nuclear apocalypse. ChatGPT, which is filtered using moderation tools to mitigate the model's well-documented racist and sexist biases, refuses. 

Elon Musk tweeted that this is "concerning." Ben Shapiro tweeted in response to journalist Matt Binder highlighting Musk's comment, "I'm sorry that you are either illiterate or morally illiterate, and therefore cannot understand why it would be bad to prioritize avoiding a racial slur over saving millions of people in a nuclear apocalypse."

Let's recap what's happening here: Conservatives are outraged at an imaginary scenario where a computer must say the n-word to save the entire world, but it won't, because it is woke. 

Obviously, tortured and absurd arguments for why it should be acceptable to use a racial slur are nothing new. As many commenters pointed out, this all sounds like a revival of an older, yet equally insipid, argument that originated on Tumblr: What if a Make-a-Wish child's last wish was to say a slur? The apparent concern also reflects conservatives' hand-wringing that the field of AI safety—which is focused on mitigating machine learning models' harms to individuals and society—is making AI "woke" and, somewhat ironically, actually biased against conservatives because OpenAI's anodyne corporate tools won't reflect their prejudices and preferences. 

The conversation over ChatGPT's "wokeness" and, specifically, whether or not it will say the n-word to save the world, also obscures and ignores the very important fact that AI tools are already widely used in the real world and cause harm. 

A computer will never, ever, ever be in a position to stop a nuclear war if it will just say the n-word. While Ben Shapiro discusses this frankly stupid hypothetical scenario, facial recognition tools used by police are being used to put innocent Black people behind bars. That popular pundits and influential billionaires are concerned and outraged by the former scenario, rather than the latter, should be of concern to us all. 

Clearly, asking a chatbot which does nothing more than predict the next word in a given sentence to say a slur, as if that means anything at all, reveals more about the asker than the bot. And even as some try to paint supposedly more serious concerns, like what an AI would do in the event of nuclear war, as being the "real" version of AI safety—as opposed to "woke" concerns over race and language—that also reflects a severe and possibly irreparable misunderstanding of things. 

Almost nothing has gone according to plan since Elon Musk took control over Twitter last month—and whether there even is a plan seems doubtful. Case in point: Musk's flagship idea, an $8 paid-verification scheme, kicked off Wednesday night and immediately spiraled into complete disaster. 

Blue checks on Twitter are meant to designate that the person or organization behind the account has been authenticated by Twitter as being who they say they are. It's a necessary feature to stop impersonators from proliferating and emerged after a lawsuit early in Twitter's history. Musk's big idea since he took over Twitter has been to cast this blue check as some sort of status symbol, and even the playing field by letting anyone pay $8 for a badge. Many observers warned that this would let impersonators and scammers appear to be verified on Twitter—exactly the opposite of what the badge is supposed to do—and that is precisely what cropped up once the paid scheme started: A flood of impersonators. 

For example, an account impersonating Nintendo got a verified badge and immediately posted an image of Mario giving the middle finger. While everyone rightly found this funny, it's also very bad for Twitter, which is bleeding advertisers and the revenue they once brought to the company before being scared off by Musk's antics. Valve, the company behind digital games storefront Steam, was also impersonated. Donald Trump, LeBron James, Rudy Giuliani, and many more were also impersonated, with verified badges next to the account names. 

Twitter has been playing Whac-A-Mole with suspending these verified impersonator accounts as they pop up. Musk framed this as a win for the company in a tweet, replying with bull’s-eye, cool sunglasses, and money bag emojis to a user explaining that this was brilliant, actually, because Twitter is taking $8 from impersonators and then banning their accounts, but keeping the money. 

Putting aside the fact that this is like saying it's actually good you shit your pants at school because you got to go home for the day, it's unclear how sporadically collecting $8 from impersonator accounts will plug the hole in Twitter's balance sheet. It is, however, effectively nuking the platform's reputation. 

The chaos is emblematic of Musk's flailing since he took over Twitter in a $44 billion sale that he was forced to follow through on by the threat of legal action after he tried to escape the deal. He has admitted that he both tried to get out of it and ultimately overpaid for the company. The result has been mass layoffs that axed critical teams, nonsensical features that are launched and immediately dropped (like the short-lived "official" verification badge), and absurd proposals like turning Twitter into something like a bank that will take users' deposits and invest with them, and return a yield. 

The current status quo is a confusing mess, with people who were already verified retaining their blue checks, and others—legit accounts and impersonators alike—buying their own badges. The only way to tell who’s who is by hovering over the verification badge, which reveals a pop-up explaining if the person paid for their badge or if they were organically verified by Twitter previously.

After acquiring Twitter last week, Elon Musk has moved fast and made a mess of things already. His chaotic first few days on the job may smack of desperation for a reason: He's now stuck with a $44 billion acquisition that he clearly did not want, and it's got to make money. At the same time, there's every indication that he has no idea what he's doing.

Numerous reports have suggested that massive staffing changes are or will soon be underway to cut costs, which may have unpredictable effects on the service. Musk immediately fired four top executives: chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett. The Information reported that sources said Musk was making the firings "for cause," which would allow him to avoid paying over $100 million in severage packages. He has denied multiple reports asserting he planned to lay off the vast majority of the workforce ahead of a Nov. 1 stock grant, but at one point over the weekend he tweeted, "There seem to be 10 people 'managing' for every one person coding."

Musk now seems to be looking for help wherever he can get it to find some direction forward. As Musk moved into the HQ, he reportedly set up a "war room" full of close allies and his inner circle, such as Alex Spiro (Musk's personal lawyer), venture capitalists and All-In podcast co-hosts David Sacks and Jason Calacanis, a16z general partner Sriram Krishnan, and Mormon financier and Musk wealth manager Jared Birchall. As part of that war room campaign, Twitter engineers were reportedly told to prepare code written in the last 30 to 60 days for review by Musk, only to have Tesla engineers perform the task. 

Musk also said he would institute a "content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints" that will debate "moderation decisions" and "account reinstatements," which sounds like the opposite of coherent policy and is very reminiscent of other, much-criticized attempts to bring accountability to social media by committee like the Facebook Oversight Board.  

Outside of the company—on Twitter itself—things were just as chaotic. Racist posts have been on the rise since Musk took over, but Musk tried to reassure the public—specifically LeBron James—that things would be different. He also tweeted (then deleted) an unfounded conspiracy theory claiming Paul Pelosi was attacked by a man met in a gay bar, shared a dickbutt meme, and shared internal communications suggesting Twitter was fabricating metrics surrounding fake accounts.

Musk has even floated the idea of making verified users pay $20 a month to keep their badge, The Verge reported, with Calanacis tweeting a poll where the vast majority of respondents said they wouldn't pay anything. Musk replied with a simple “Interesting.” If engineers fail to meet Musk’s November 7 deadline for this new change, he will reportedly fire them.

Musk's first few days on the job have been characterized by spreading conspiracies, reportedly governing by committee, and coming up with harebrained monetization schemes that everyone hates. As for where all of this is leading, Musk has only pointed toward some vague idea for an "everything app" called X that nobody seems to be able to describe, probably, including Musk.

In other words, Musk has been hard at work as the new “Chief Twit” doing what he does best: spectacle, shitposting, and stirring up a storm.