2024: Elon is found guilty of failing to uphold the obligations imposed on Twitter back in their 2011 lawsuit around misuse of information; Former Twitter staff are found to have heroically attempted to follow the law but were fired for doing so; Elon is ordered to sell X
2025: Mastodon buys it for five million dollars; Elon is forced to sell all his shares in Tesla/SpaceX to pay a $200b fine to the FTC (his net worth is $201b, so he'd still be filthy rich - important to make the fine actually payable so he can't declare bankruptcy);
late 2025: Mastodon rebrands X to Twitter which becomes just another Fediverse instance. One that is popular among high profile celebrities who can pay a fee to have their identity verified. One where posting discriminatory content gets you banned, permanently. Anyone who retweets your post is also banned for a month.
2026: FTC sets gets to use all $200 billion on their own budget in order to hire more staff and do their job properly going forward
2027 into the foreseeable future: every company in America suddenly starts pro-actively obeying FTC regulations instead of waiting for enforcement actions that almost never happen due to a lack of funding.