The perverse joys of Elon Musk buying Twitter

The predictable yet somehow still hilarious news that Elon Musk is to acquire Twitter for $44 billion has been greeted with the usual chorus of anguished hand-wringing. The left seems appalled that such an unconventional and apparently ungovernable figure now has control of the most volatile social media platform in the world. (It’s hard to imagine that Musk purchasing, say, Instagram would have led to anything like this level of excitement and upset.)

Yet even as one acknowledges that Twitter in its current state is hardly run by a commune of basket-weaving, soya-milking Brooklyn hippies, the flamboyant Mr Musk remains one of the oddest men to have emerged in public life for decades.

I do not have the space to detail the various escapades that the world’s richest human has engaged in over the past few years, many of which seem to have been conducted as if for large bets.