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About the only people happy with Elon Musk's first days at Twitter were the network's shareholders, who saw their long moribund stock turn into hard cash at the rate of $54.20 per share, a price that anyone paying attention knew was way more than they were actually worth.
Everyone else, it seemed, was up in arms, including most of the employees, many of whom were laid off, and a subset of the site's heaviest and most progressive users. Shonda Rhimes ("Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye!") and Whoopi Goldberg ("I'm getting off today because I just feel like it's so messy") to name but two, exited the platform in theatrical fashion, as did Sara Bareilles and Toni Braxton.
In her announcement on "The View," Goldberg headed down a rabbit hole of absurd paradoxes.
"People keep saying it's free speech, but all speech is not free speech," she said. "Some speech is not OK free speech. So everybody has to agree on that, but if people keep saying, 'You hurt my free speech,' it's going to be a problem."
We'll let you sort that one out. Suffice to say that some people only now believe in the speech they deem acceptable.
But let's be clear about a few things. Twitter was losing money and, for a public company, that's generally a problem. Even during the halcyon days for social media, otherwise known as the pandemic, Twitter did not see any kind of meaningful increase in shareholder value, certainly not as compared with other channels such as Facebook.