Elon Musk entered Twitter HQ as its new owner carrying a sink and tweeting, “Let that sink in.” Things have been sinkin’ ever since. Mass firings. Terrible leadership. Major resignations. (Tweets can now only have 120 characters. 160 of them quit in disgust.) A horrible verified blue check program that lasted only about a day, but still did major damage to the Twitter brand (and many other brands, too). It’s sad for the company, the employees, the users, Musk’s co-investors and debt-holders, and in a bizarre way, Musk himself. His Twitter addiction got him into a terrible deal and the courts wouldn’t let him back out of it. He wanted to own the libs, instead he owns an albatross. Musk could have been viewed as one of the great titans of our era, instead, he’s tweeted his way into being a despised laughingstock. And like any Twitter addict, Musk knows that that Twitter is the worst place to embarrass yourself. Casey Newton with a great look Inside the Twitter meltdown.

+ Things “changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.” The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost argues that The Age of Social Media Is Ending. I’m not so sure that’s happening. But it’s definitely a better prediction than the one Jack Dorsey made.