But there is also the perennial belief that Twitter should be something other than what it is. There’s no shortage of people who believe that all Twitter needs is some fix — an edit function, different management, a new type of technology backbone, a shift of advertising strategy, lower expenses and app tweaks, or more lax rules of expression, as Musk wants.

Politicians and other influential people, including Musk, regularly complain that Twitter is censoring too much or too little. And investors in Twitter perpetually say that the company doesn’t make enough money.

If I could boil that down to a sentence, it’s that Twitter is not Facebook, which has 23 times the annual revenue of Twitter and nearly 2 billion daily users to Twitter’s 217 million. (The companies count users slightly differently, but you get the point.)

‘What’s wrong with Twitter?’

“The cultural influence of Twitter is just as great as Facebook and yet it’s one-twentieth of the size,” said Mark Mahaney, who has followed Twitter for years as an investment analyst now with Evercore ISI. That makes people ask, “‘What is wrong with Twitter?’” he said.

And yet, the people and companies who have looked closely at buying Twitter have mostly been scared off. In 2016, Disney backed off its flirtation with buying it partly because executives worried about trashing the company’s family-friendly image if it owned an unruly social media app. The Salesforce boss, Marc Benioff, changed his mind when Salesforce’s investors hated the idea of a business software company owning Twitter.

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The government authorities most likely wouldn’t permit companies that would seem to be a good fit with Twitter, including Google and Facebook, to buy it because of antitrust concerns.

Twitter is too big, but also not big enough. It is good, but also not good enough. It is not Facebook, which makes people want to buy it but also not want to. Twitter could give any owner influence but also unwanted heat.

Musk might be one of the few people in the world who is brave (or foolish) enough to want to own Twitter and actually do it. Maybe Musk is the one who can finally unleash Twitter’s potential. Or maybe he’ll just wind up on the long list of people who once believed that they could.