Elon Musk walked into the Twitter headquarters carrying a kitchen sink; in two weeks from then he seems to be doing his best to flush the company down it.

Not since Trump’s coronation and reign has any other event created such saturation coverage in the media as Musk’s daily shenanigans at Twitter. As advertisers flee the platform, fake blue ticks proliferate, and Musk wipes out most of the employee base, most business and tech pundits are confidently predicting the death of the company. The general public is watching the drama with a morbid fascination, as a megalomaniacal billionaire seems to be toying around with his latest acquisition. Horrified Twitterati are furiously exploring alternatives, when, not if, Twitter goes away into the Martian sunset. The end of the platform seems nigh.

I, too, happen to be one of the Twitter original, blue-ticked cognoscenti anxiously awaiting its impending doom. But will the platform fade away, and should it be allowed to? Twitter, for all its ills, does fulfil a very important role – that of a global town square, a democratized broadcaster of public opinion, sometimes a real force for good. The last was very apparent in Tahrir Square, it is helping spark the people’s revolution in Iran, and is sometimes the only way people reach out for desperate help in natural and man-made disasters. While its demise is a very real possibility, here are my, rather hopeful, five scenarios of what could happen to Twitter, and how it could be saved, and perhaps resurrected:

1. A good possibility is for one of the Big Techs to swoop in and buy Twitter off Musk. They will not buy it at the price Musk paid, but as the company rapidly descends into a near-death state, the price would come down precipitously. I see Microsoft as a contender – Satya Nadella bought LinkedIn and GitHub, he was keen on TikTok! Twitter would be a prized asset on the Azure cloud, and there could be some solid synergy scenarios with Microsoft Teams, 365, or even LinkedIn. Google is another contender, they have been unsuccessfully trying to build a social network for ages, and an inorganic way to build another Google+ might not be a bad idea. Oracle is a possibility too, Larry Ellison is still fretting over the loss of LinkedIn, and he has just bought Slack. The only problem – owning Twitter is fraught with regulatory, reputational, and even geopolitical risk, and the Tech Titans might be wary therefore.
   
2. The employees might rise and buy the company from their befuddled owner. The chances are not very high, but MBOs or Management Buyouts are not uncommon. Michael Dell bought his namesake company back from the shareholders, Richard Branson has done the same with some Virgin companies. It might be a good idea for Jack Dorsey or another credible tech luminary (Bill Gates?) to team up with key employees, get some PE backers and buy the company back. Musk paid a high price for it but might give it away for cents on the dollar just to get it off his back.
   
3. Or Twitter could be just open-sourced and broken-up. It might achieve a Mastodon-like decentralised structure with a community or a foundation (like the Linux Foundation), a near-Web3 property with users and creators owning the platform. This is what both Dorsey and Musk rhapsodize about, and it could be a great solution, but only if it could be done. Creating a decentralised, community-owned social network is an excellent concept, but is virtually impossible to create at scale, as Mastodon’s struggles itself have shown.
   
4. In a manner similar to the fully decentralized ownership above, perhaps a concerned, well-meaning, wealthy group of people come together to buy Twitter off Musk and rebuild it as a real, impartial, town square. They form a consortium and create a management team to manage the company, reporting to them. This could be created in a not-for-profit, B-company model with the objective being to provide a democratic platform for creativity, protest and dialogue. It is an idealistic scenario but is perhaps the best of the lot. As an aside, I do see Anand Mahindra, with his 10mn followers, and a reputation for leveraging Twitter as a megaphone to do good, being one of the members of the consortia.
   
5. Similar to the above, perhaps a global institution intervenes and takes control of the company. It is far-fetched to imagine, but this could be one of the more useful things that the United Nations could do in its checkered history. Data and opinion platforms are very powerful weapons now, as Donald Trump showed in his presidency. Owning this for the world and regulating it much like they regulated nuclear would not be a bad thing for the UN to think about.

There could be other possibilities other than the above. Some of the ideas above border on the realms of fantasy, but one of them could well be the end game for the beleaguered social network.  The alternative is certain lingering death.