Hear ye, hear ye! Time to gather round the town square of the internet, because it might not look like it does now for much longer. It’s been confirmed: after weeks of speculation and negotiation, the board of Twitter finally accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to buy it yesterday. In a move that knocks the Zuck down a peg or two when it comes to memeable social media magnates, the Tesla CEO is to assume sole ownership of the place where everyone comes to watch people more deranged than they are get into ridiculous arguments.

The bird app’s new billionaire overlord has had a huge presence on the platform over the past few years, using it as a sounding board for dumb ideas, making grand proclamations that never come to pass (how’s solving world hunger going, Elon?), and posting stolen memes of variable quality. In short, he has acted like every other wannabe clout chaser. The key difference is the stupid amount of money behind him. This apparently makes him worthy of his almost 85 million follower count, and the keys to one of the most influential kingdoms of social media. 

As far as future plans for the site are concerned, it seems like nothing much is changing yet. Musk has shared his hopes that «even [his] worst critics» will stick around, in the spirit of championing free speech. At the same time, it seems like there could be a lot to come in the future, including open source algorithms, a crackdown on spam bots, and the relaxation of censorship rules.

Predictably, the reaction of many Twitter users seemed to suggest that this was nothing short of the end of days. Faced with the idea of their favorite place changing hands from a handful of shady plutocrats to one more famous and more annoying shady plutocrat, things quickly became hysterical. 

Between the fallout from the deal itself, Musk’s cringey online presence, the numerous unsavory things in his past and his recent high profile break up, people have been spoilt for choice with the witty ways in which they can have a meltdown. Some rich dude might now dictate how we experience yet another type of social media, but he will never break the wild and manic spirit that keeps it going.