"Just Eight Dollars A Month"

Just eight dollars a month. That's less than the price of Chipotle burrito. But it can make all the difference in the world to the billionaire who owns this site.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) November 3, 2022

Not as far-fetched as I first thought:

If he were merely the richest man in the world and not instead a billionaire whose wealth is heavily invested in an existing company that is subject to the whim of the market, a company the value of which has been damaged by Elmo’s Twitter tantrum — if he were spending his own money on the purchase — it might have ended there. But to pull off the purchase, he added a bunch of new debt to a company already reeling under its existing debt load, making the dire financial situation of Twitter even worse, in the middle of a tech downturn.

To make matters still worse, the entire world knows that the richest man in the world just made one of the worst deals in history, buying a company worth maybe $20 billion — a company whose own worth he spent months diminishing — for $44 billion.

But wait, let's back up a minute!  Why did Elmo do this? (and more and more the idea of "baby monster" seems apt):

At this point, a week into Elmo’s ownership, it’s unclear whether he went through with the purchase because he really wanted to buy the joint, or because in the face of exposure in the spring (in the form of due diligence), and last month (in the form of a deposition and trial), he kept doubling down, effectively dodging scrutiny of his own suitability to run Twitter by throwing money at it, $44 billion instead of the billion he’d have to pay to back out of the deal. And for much of that time, Elmo responded to Twitter’s scrutiny by attacking the company.

Yeah, forgot about that, didn't we?  Elmo could have backed out of this for $1 billion.  He didn't, and the court was gonna make him eat it, but nobody makes Elmo do nothin'!  So he bought it.  Financial genius, this guy.

The richest man in the world just got his ass handed to him, and in his first act after consummating this forced marriage, he fired the people who handed him his ass in such a way that Elmo will either have to pay severance or settle lawsuits for the way he fired them.

And he's making his staff work 84 hour weeks, which is a great way to build morale and improve efficiency! Oh, wait, we're not doing that anymore?

I do think this conclusion by emptywheel is compellingly reasoned:

Until then, though, I think Elmo’s serial meltdown on Twitter is better explained by his discomfort in a new role, in which he needs to convince ordinary people and security-conscious celebrities to stay, rather than persuading venture capitalists and captive tech journalists of the brilliance of his grandiose ideas, all while trying to snooker everyone into believing that the pay system will address the problems with Twitter rather than the problems built into Elmo’s purchase of Twitter.

Elmo loathes precisely the people he needs most right now, and he loathes them, in part, because they just saw him make an epically shitty business deal, a deal so epically shitty, in part, because Elmo wanted to prevent anyone from looking at him too closely. His response to that is to invite their complaints, so long as they pay $8 to make them.

It’s a con, but for some reason Elmo thinks the people who just saw him get fleeced will fall for it.

I'd put it more prosaically.  Elmo shit where he eats.  And did so very, very publicly.  Especially since, as it turns out (and very reasonably, too), Elmo was screwed the moment he inked the deal with Twitter.  He put Tesla on the line, too; or at least his share in it:

I agree this is a forced marriage. But to be clear, there was absolutely no way that Musk was going to get out of it once he signed the contract. Delaware Chancery Court is its own special thing, and Musk got outlawyered at the outset because of his own impulsiveness. The (chief) Chancellor in Delaware is brilliant & tough and has no pity for white shoe law firms having to work long hours on short schedules. Also, since Tesla is a Delaware corporation, once a judgement was entered, if it wasn’t honored she would simply seize Musk’s shares in Tesla to satisfy it-no recourse for Elmo. 

Just another idiot who thinks money conquers everything.  No wonder he sounds so much like Trump.  They could be twin sons of different mothers.