 2022 has not been kind to Elon Musk to put it lightly. Not only did he choose to make one of the dumbest decisions ever by purchasing Twitter in the first place, but he bought it for far more than it's worth. And in addition to that, Tesla's shares have plummeted. He went from being the richest person in the world to becoming the only person in history to lose $200 billion in net worth. And perhaps worse for him is that he's learned that most people don't like him. In fact, they view him as a complete joke and he's even the laughing stock on his own platform now. So to say that 2022 was a tumultuous year for Elon Musk would be an understatement, but he seemingly responded to his fall from grace on Twitter with a really sad tweet saying, 12 months ago, I was person of the year. Yeah. And now look at you. A lot can change in a year, but for you, sir, all I have is the world's tiniest violin. And that was pretty much everyone's response. So they replied to him when he made that tweet and they roasted him as they usually do. Randy Bryce wrote, setting $44 billion of flame can do wonders. Brandon Friedman shared a tweet from Donnie Snarko, which reads, well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions. Travis Allen writes, this year, you're the worst person of the year. Molly Jung fast says, before you started tweeting, there's a lesson here. John Marshall says, hello, darkness, my old friend. That's a good one. Christina Wong just juxtaposed his time person of the year cover with a time opinion piece critiquing Elon Musk's erratic behavior. Marty Shannon writes, now you're a type of person of the year. Alejandra Caraballo says amazing what transphobia does to a person. You destroy $200 billion of your wealth, set a social media company on a path to bankruptcy and you nuked your public image all because you didn't like a transphobic joke being taken down by Twitter. And that went on and on and on. And really, if you ever just want to see a good Elon Musk roast session, all you have to do is look at the replies to any of his tweets. And there are countless people relentlessly shitting on him. Now, there's a plethora of reasons to hate Elon Musk from his douchey demeanor to the fact that he's a greedy billionaire. But I specifically can't stand him because of the impact that he has on society and his reach, even if he's more hated now, has been amplified because he is the owner of Twitter. And he is actively trying to make Twitter a worse platform, which has deleterious impacts on society itself. For example, as Jessica Corbett of Common Dreams explains, as advertisers depart Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk's recent takeover, the billionaire owner continues to shake up the social media platform, which on Tuesday relaxed a ban on political and issue-based advertising, put in place over three years. When then CEO Jack Dorsey announced the ban in October of 2019, he explained that this isn't about free expression. This is about paying for reach, and paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. While advertising was Twitter's primary revenue source pre-Musk, it's not clear that the policy change will notably benefit the company from a financial standpoint. Before the ban, political ad spending for the U.S. 2018 midterm cycle was less than $3 million. Twitter's total revenue was $3 billion in 2018, and in 2021, it topped $5 billion, $4.51 billion of which came from ads. A few weeks after Musk bought the company in October, Media Matters for America revealed that 50 of its 100 top advertisers, which collectively accounted for nearly $2 billion in spending on the platform since 2020, and over $750 million in advertising in 2022 alone, had announced or seemingly stopped advertising on Twitter. Now, I think that the last paragraph does indeed give us some insight into his true motivations. Yes, political ad spending didn't account for much compared to other ad revenue that Twitter rakes in, but still, $3 million, that's $3 million more that Twitter currently doesn't have. So if he brings back political ads, then that's just more money in his pocket, and he is desperate after losing $200 billion of his own net worth. So he wants to make this company profitable, and he's going to do that even if it makes society demonstrably worse. Now, the thing about political ads and why I think that Twitter was right in the first place to ban them is that they are incredibly deceptive. We don't know who funds them oftentimes. A super PAC from either party can just create an ad that's completely fictitious, smear somebody, and there's basically no accountability for that. I mean, Republicans, they do this, but Democrats can also do the same exact thing. In fact, they do do this. I've seen ads. You've seen the mailers that are incredibly deceptive that get sent to our homes every election season. So to allow that on Twitter means he's simply allowing for more misinformation. And this isn't even an issue about free speech. So I hate that like every single policy change that he makes is supposedly under the pretense of free speech. No, this isn't about free speech. It's about money. Am I denying the speech of some crypto company that wants to advertise for a minute in one of my videos? No, I'm simply not making an unethical decision. I'm simply saying, no, you don't get to use my platform to spread your nonsense, to scam other people, to deceive other people. So this isn't even about free speech, but in 2023 America, every single thing that Elon Musk does is analyzed under the prism of how does this impact free speech when it doesn't? This is a financial decision period end of story. But things like this are why people hate Elon Musk in the first place, but to be fair to him, it's not like the 2019 policy change was that great because there were some loopholes that did still lead to deceptive ads. As digital rights activist Evan Grip points out via Twitter, Twitter allowed banks to run ads about environmental initiatives, but didn't allow environmental activists to run ads about those banks fossil fuel investments. So what Twitter views as political is highly subjective in the first place, but still now to add super PACs, buying ads into the equation is going to make the next election even more miserable than it already is likely to be with Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis at the helm for Republicans. But either way, it's just another bad policy failure of Elon Musk on Twitter. And the platform overall has become a hellscape. We see these huge changes that he makes, but it's the small things that he does day after day that gradually make the platform a worse place. But as he continues to destroy Twitter and run it into the ground, people are going to continue to dunk on him because he's a joke and he doesn't know what he's doing. So this is why people don't like him. So I'm glad that he's at least aware of the fact that he once was loved, but now not so much. People view him as a fucking joke and rightfully so. Will you actually let go? Ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da.