Elon Musk can't tweet his way out of this

If you were one of the people who fled to Mastodon after Musk bought the service, we regret to tell you that you missed one of the best hours.

The weekend left Musk looking incompetent, indecisive, and inconsiderate, as well as some of the employees he fired. The full flailing feel of it was captured by one widely-sharedtweet.

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Musk went back to his usual posts on Monday. He endorsed the GOP and shared a meme with a picture of a Wehrmacht soldier in World War II. One of the things that users caught was the slide in the stock of the company after he took to social media. The stock hit a 17-month low Monday.

By the time you read this, Musk might have posted at least a half-dozen new bids to take control of the narrative. The narrative of math doesn't change. Even though Musk's wealth is in the hands of investors, the math says he can't afford what he's getting.

Gary Black, one of the top investors in the company and a Musk ally, wrote Monday that the news on the social media site keeps getting worse. "Elon's top engineers shouldn't be threatening people on social media."

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Musk buys a business that is 90 percent dependent on advertising, and that's the reason he can't take a break. He has lost advertisers' trust while trying to court them. Even if Musk goes thermonuclear on any brand that walks out, it isn't as bad for advertisers as he wraps himself around himself like a cloak. It's a step in the wrong direction when a person says something like that.

Even if the "8 for a blue check" plan made financial sense, Musk already messed it up. Accounts that already have blue checks have been charged backtracks. The money will come from somewhere.

This is the question we have to ask about the FAQ from the sales team. The team claims that there are 15 million more people on the platform every day. It doesn't mean that Musk's antics are drawing a crowd, he's only been there for two weeks.

Let's suppose they are. It's still a crowd of Bugs Bunnies hitting CEO Elmer Fudd and his horrorshow with giant slapstick hammers, along with darker political chaos from a growingMAGA crowd that Musk favors. How many brands would like to be associated with that?

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Musk needs to fire his way to success. Costs for the year were $5.6 billion. The debt that Musk had to take on as part of his deal will cost the company up to $1 billion a year to serve.

The service is bleeding $3 million and losses are rising every day, so the company decided to fire 50 percent of their employees. We don't know how many of them are being hired back, whether they are contracting their services back at a higher rate, or how much they're costing. Thanks to state laws in California and New York, this is costing more than Musk's yes men, and his inner circle is all men.

Let's give it a try. Let's say Musk somehow finds the $1 billion a year in infrastructure cuts he's looking for, and that he gets away with no black outs on a hugely popular social media service that requires a lot of expensive server space. He's saving billions of dollars a year after the firings.

Without advertisers, Musk would be left with a $3 billion-a-year hole to fill. He was going to have to give his stock to the public. It would be cheaper for Musk to just shovel the cash into the incinerator.

Is it possible that Musk and his inner circle will institute a paywall for all of the social networking site? That would be the end of a beloved service that relies on a lot of users freely sharing information.

He's a thin-skinned guy who lashes out a lot and his own internal rules seem wildly inconsistent. It's sad after a point.

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Musk's title of richest man in the world would be at risk if a paywall were to be put in place. Musk shrugged and said that the economics killedTwitter. The rich guy broke a toy. Musk could save a face by joining us all on whichever service fills the void.

Musk has spent years cultivating a persona of a teenage edgelord, but now he behaves like an adult with some measure of accountability towards the advertisers who keep the lights on. Don't give up.