You may be aware that Twitter – the miserable, meaningless, insipid, pointless digital wasteland of broken dreams, shattered lives, worthless bickering and bubbling hatreds that’s been, since 2006, helping humans squander, on an industrial scale, the precious time the good Lord as seen fit to allot them – has been obtained by the world’s loftiest lunatic.

In a protracted and deeply vapid ‘saga’, that nevertheless sent huge sections of the media into vertiginous paroxysms of speculation, horror and joy (sometimes in the same paragraph) over the course of the last few months, Elon Musk, for it is he, has finally got his hands on the wretched thing.

It’s cost him $46bn (real money: £39bn) – which isn’t even small change for the world’s richest man, as he seems to have made use of freedom-loving Saudi money to complete the deal.

Anyhow, what does this all mean? Does it matter? Will it matter? Does anything really matter? Really?

Since the takeover, Musk has taken a witty, if somewhat deranged, line on Twitter itself. Central to the purchase (or so he would have us believe) appears to be the question of free speech, the most important thing ever, according to Musk (what? More important than his money? Come on, man!)

Thusly, the barmy billionaire has more than hinted about allowing any old bigoted, insurrection-whipping numbskull (Donald Trump, for instance) to tweet out whatever mad, bad, dangerous drivel that might happen to skirt across the surface of their bleak, tender mind – which includes the reinstatement of those barred by the previous regime for outrageous behaviours and deep, deep stupidities (Donald Trump, for instance).

In the immediate wake of Musk’s messy procurement, racist tweets increased 500% – the authors apparently emboldened by the network’s new boss’s endless chirping about ‘free speech’ and so on, which, to them – and to Musk, too, perhaps – means nothing more and nothing less than being able to use the, for instance, ‘N-Word’ as much as you like, whenever you like, wherever you like. That’s the way it has to be, apparently. Anything else is Nazi Germany-level tyrannical suppression of the human being’s nature-gifted right to express itself as freely as a, I dunno,  a spring cuckoo in a tree.

And from there it’s kind of snowballed into shallower and shallower levels of triteness. Musk has suggested that he wants to start charging the great and good (which means, in no particular order, journalists, politicians and celebrities) $8 a month to have a blue tick on their profile, something now handed freely to anyone who can prove that it is truly themselves wasting away their days on Twitter and not a bot or a Russian or a Russian bot or a parody account etc.

Talking of parody accounts, the world’s most committed free speech enthusiast – that’ll be Elon Musk – has been busy handing out lifetime bans to those that seemed to take his professed views on free speech a bit too seriously and, in an attempt at comedy/mild protest, changed their account names to ‘Elon Musk’. Hahaha, my sides are splitting. You’re banned.

Consequently, those of a left-wing bent are, on the whole, deeply dismayed about the affair, with many threatening, but not quite managing, to leave the network. Those of a right-wing persuasion, meanwhile, are mostly jubilant, seeing in Musk a kindly almost messianic figure that’s come to free them of the shackles of, broadly speaking, 50 or so years of societal progress.

The big questions remain: will Trump be reinstated? How’s Musk going to make his money back? How racist and generally hate-filled will Twitter become (and let’s face it, it was already utterly abysmal before Musk bought it)? Finally, will human beings ever overcome this insatiable hunger for rubbish?

In the meanwhile, we can look forward to the Lazarus-like reactivation of such luminaries as Katie Hopkins and Milo Yiannopoulos. Merry Christmas! Pass the cyanide.