IN OCTOBER 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. Less than a year later, he killed the platform dead.

It all started with a joke. A bad joke, at that. Worse still, a legally enforceable joke. The Delaware Court of Chancery certainly didn't find it very funny. A significant portion of the Twitter userbase wasn't laughing either. Come to think of it, I wasn't particularly tickled, elbow-deep as I was in writing a book—this book—about the social-media platform. In fact, the way it went down was less of a joke and more of a farce. In April 2022, tech billionaire Musk made an inexplicably generous offer to buy Twitter, chasing a cheap laugh. He offered a share price of $54.20—a 38% premium on the stock—to make a reference to illicit drugs: “420” is popular slang for cannabis. Musk's offer was a gold-plated deal that Twitter shareholders simply couldn't refuse; they were laughing all the way to the bank. The sale was on.

Many tweeters were considerably more circumspect about the prospect of a Musk takeover, however, as they grew concerned about how the change in leadership could radically alter the platform's culture, and not for the better. They were not wrong. Musk had gotten cold feet, too. In July, he desperately tried to pull out of the purchase agreement, claiming that Twitter hadn’t disclosed key figures, including the number of fake and spam accounts active on the platform.2 Twitter was having none of it.