Some concerns have to do with Musk’s personal volatility, such as the 2018 incident in which he got into a spat with a British cave explorer working on the rescue of teens trapped in a cave in Thailand and called him “pedo guy.” But presumably, Musk as Twitter CEO would still rely on advisers and staff to run it. And if he did run it erratically, sane users would desert it en masse—which many people might say would be the best thing to happen to our democracy.

I wouldn’t go that far. However, I do think one potentially good lesson from the Musk/Twitter saga would be to prompt a rethinking of the extent to which we have made Twitter our “town square”—given that only one in five Americans use it and 10 percent of users provide 80 percent of the content. (Notably, Twitter’s policing of election-fraud and anti-vaxx conspiracy theories has not prevented large segments of the population from embracing them.)

Part of Twitter’s outsize importance is that it’s the playpen of choice for media and for political activists. It can be a useful tool for news gathering and discussion, but it can also create a faux consensus increasingly adrift from the real world. Too many journalists are too married to Twitter.