It seems like Elon lacks the ability to control his behavior when he can tweet based on a momentary impulse. Elon has many bright ideas but not every notion of his is appropriate for public consumption. He ought to hand over the credentials to a PR or even a law firm so he can send all his tweets through them. And ask them to change the password.
I've been saying for years that Twitter ought to be offering that as a paid-for feature. They don't even have to charge much for it. Even something as simple as "All tweets have a 120 second delay during which time the following users will be pinged, shown the tweet, and given veto powers on it".
I'd pay for it just to have my wife be able to say "Really? You want to tweet another picture of the cat? No."
I could see from an ideological perspective Twitter's entire mission being to delete the middleman and the moderating PR managers and public statement lawyer sanitation of everything public figures ever say, which was the only way laypeople heard anything a famous person ever said (that or tabloid gossip "overheard"s). I can respect that ideology, but it of course comes with its own set of problems.
Personally I'm amused and ok with famous people facing the consequences of voicing their opinions, and also them getting roasted by normal civilians in public thanks to twitter.
Jack Dorsey just discussed this concept a bit in an interview on Bill Simmons' podcast. They were discussing the pitfalls of giving users (or others) the ability to edit/delete their tweets.
In discussing having a N-second window where a user can correct typos, Dorsey brought it down to a tradeoff between real-timeness and correctibility. Essentially he feels that much of Twitter's charm as a platform comes from the fact that updates feel "live", so every delay from tweet source to delivery needs to be given a heavy cost in the cost/benefit analysis.
Adding a delay like that as a feature (especially for a figure notable enough to move the stock market with a tweet) would undermine that message completely, by preventing that figure from engaging with the conversation in real time.
At this point they should seriously do this. Build a twitter clone app for a few 100k, and then hire an around the clock crew to review tweets as they go out. It would be 100% worth it.
