Elon isn’t buying free speech, he’s buying a captive audience in time for elections.

Building a Twitter clone isn’t hard. Not for a billion dollars it’s not, much less 44 billion. Even Trump’s gang figured out how to build a rudimentary app, what they can’t do, not ever — is get a large user base. The app is known for being alt -right friendly, and there just aren’t as many people alt-right friendly as they’d like you to believe. Certainly not enough to keep that tire fire burning.

What is hard though, is cultivating a large user base. Convincing people to trust not just your brand, but trust that others will also see the value in your brand. You need to convince enough trusted accounts, influencers, media personalities and journalists who have built their careers on Twitter to move to your platform and bring their followers. Sometimes, even that’s not enough as a few celebrity startups have proven. Sure, though, it’s still possible, but not in time for the next major US Election.

Pause for a moment and let me tell you the story of LJ. Way back, before Facebook or Twitter or even MySpace, there was LiveJournal. People would share stories, content, lives, have comment wars and troll before you even knew who Jack Dorsey was.

Content moderation became a big issue. Twice in a span of 3 months (known as Strikethrough and Boldthrough), they deleted accounts and groups attempting to contain child predatory content, but also deleted a lot of legitimate groups and accounts as well.

They also were in financial trouble. They tried a lot of different methods to stay in business, went back on promises of “free basic accounts forever”, and in the end they sold to a company in Russia.

After destroying user’s trust — there were rumors that the Russian company would be censoring LJ, especially LGBTQIA+ content. LJ never regained the users’ trust. As other social media came on the scene , LJ emptied slowly out until all that was left was George R.R. Martin.

Under the charge of a single person not beholden to anyone, this is the future of Twitter. People will slowly leave as they find new media more responsive to their needs, and that they trust more. (Tiktok already has a large base and is addictive despite their ongoing problems with content moderation.)

But in the meantime, buckle up — it’s going to look a lot like the 2016 elections.