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Elon Musk is the last rich man Falling into Twitter’s trap.

For nearly its entire 16-year life, Twitter had a reputation for not fulfilling its potential and could be so much more. The enigma of Twitter is that while it’s widely known, it’s not so widely used, that it’s financially successful but not insanely, sometimes proficiently managed but also chaotic and exciting but also eerily effective.

The persistent belief that Twitter is far from being a great idea has led many people to consider buying the company to make it shine, but almost no one really wants to own it.

Whether you’re addicted to Twitter or one of the majority of the world outside the app, what happens to this company matters. Twitter is a digital meeting place that world leaders increasingly fear and want to control, and where elected officials, activists, journalists and executives like Musk spread their messages and reckon.

Musk made an unfinished offer To buy Twitter, which last week put a sign for sale to the company. What happens next is anyone’s guess.

Maybe Musk will own Twitter if he continues to engage long enough. find money bags to help him meet his nearly $43 billion bid. Maybe a different billionaire, tech company or financial investor Will buy instead. Maybe nobody buys Twitter.

Living with an uncertain future is nothing new for Twitter. You can spend days counting how many times companies work. have taken into account buying social media site or that there rumors about possible sales.

Twitter is permanently for sale, in part for technical reasons. Unlike some tech and media companies, including Google, Facebook, and The New York Times, Twitter doesn’t have a specific type of stock that gives its founders the power other than to veto a sale.

But there is a perpetual belief that Twitter must be something different than it is. There’s no shortage of people who believe that all Twitter needs is some fix – a edit function, different managementa new type of technology backbonea ad strategy change, lower costs and app tweaksor looser expression rules, Just like Musk wanted.

Politicians and other influential people, including Musk, regularly complain that Twitter is censoring too much or too little. And investors on Twitter are constantly saying the company isn’t making enough money.

If I were to reduce it to one sentence, it’s 23 times Twitter’s annual revenue and Twitter’s 217 million are not Facebook with nearly two billion daily users. (Companies count users a little differently, but you get the point.)

“Twitter’s cultural impact is as big as Facebook, and yet one-twentieth its size,” said Mark Mahaney, who has now followed Twitter for years as an investment analyst with Evercore ISI. This means ‘What’s wrong with Twitter?’ makes him ask,” he said.

Still, people and companies that looked closely at buying Twitter were mostly scared. In 2016, Disney gave up on dating, buying it partly because of executives. worried about tarnishing the company’s family-friendly image if he has a rebellious social media app. Salesforce boss Marc Benioff changed his mind when Salesforce’s investors arrived. i hate the idea A commercial software company that owns Twitter.

Government officials will likely not allow companies that appear to be eligible for Twitter, including Google and Facebook, to buy it, due to antitrust concerns.

Twitter is huge but not big enough. Good but also not good enough. It’s not Facebook that’s making people want to buy it or not. Twitter can give any owner effect, but also unwanted heat.

Musk may be one of the few people in the world who wants to have Twitter and is brave (or stupid) enough to actually do it. Maybe it’s Musk who can finally unlock Twitter’s potential. Or perhaps it will end up on a long list of people who once believed they could do it.

Before you go …

• Ads are probably coming to Netflix: Company announced that he is losing subscribers and expects to lose more. In response, my colleague Nicole Sperling said that Netflix plans to sell a lower-cost subscription that shares accounts and – which is a big deal – with ads at some point.

  More from Vox: Netflix was the streaming leader for a decade. “Now everyone is catching up.”

• Using memes to help Ukraine: My colleague Jane Arraf wrote about her charitable fundraising efforts for Ukrainians: selling goods that contain wartime visual jokes That’s including one of the Virgin Mary holding an anti-tank missile, which often circulates online.

• Technical support and administrators for adult video streaming are: The rest of the world goes behind the camera Representative of Colombia’s erotic streaming industry, including people who fix online glitches for artists, remind them of their lunch breaks, and help design everyday topics for their webcam shows. (A warning that this article has some obscene descriptions.)

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