Thursday, April 14, 2022

Elon wants Twitter

I've been hearing the phrase hostile takeover ever since Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter's stock and then rejected a seat on its board. The rumor was that, if Musk accepted the board seat, he'd be constrained in what he could do with the company. It now seems that Musk wants nothing less than to remake all of Twitter into something else: a truly private company that actually respects free speech and doesn't label everything that goes Against the Narrative as "disinformation." Twitter and other Big Tech firms have, for years, skated by on the ambiguity of whether they serve the public as platforms or as publishers (see my discussion here). If Musk has his way, Twitter will clearly, and officially, declare itself to be one or the other, and I'm betting on platform.

How is Musk possibly going to get his way?

By buying all of Twitter. Musk is the richest man in the world; he can do this. Musk has a net worth of over $265 billion. He has formally proposed to buy Twitter in its entirety at a price of over $50 a share, putting the total purchase cost at around $43 billion. While not exactly chump change for Musk, the purchase would still leave him fantastically rich, and it probably wouldn't take him long to recoup his expenses.

I ought to be jumping for joy at the thought of a free Twitter, but I still have a lot of lingering animosity toward the company, and as I've said before, I'm a bit of a Musk skeptic. It's not obvious to me that Twitter will simply metamorphose into a much bigger version of Gab, full of sunshine and unicorn-rainbow farts. I can imagine Twitter curdling, after Musk takes it over, and moving in an unforeseen-yet-sinister direction. An inner voice of caution warns against worshiping the filthy-rich, even when they seem to be doing the right thing. Maybe I'm being over-cautious; time will tell. But even if Musk takes over Twitter and drains its swamp, what happens years later, after Musk? No one—and nothing—is forever, after all. And Musk might decide to abandon Twitter at some later date; it wouldn't be the first time a businessman abandoned an investment and left wreckage in his wake.

Go ahead—tell me I'm a worrywart and a pessimist in the comments. But, hey—I'll be happy to be proven wrong. Maybe a Musk takeover of Twitter is just what the world needs right now. With so many leftie billionaires underwriting ostensibly socialist causes, it's about time a rich person did something that wasn't quite as red.

Here's angry-boy Ryan Kinel's reaction to Musk's latest:

Maybe stepping down was the best thing hippie fuckhead Jack Dorsey ever did.



4 comments:

John Mac said...

A Musk-owned Twitter has to be better than what currently exists. I'll settle for that.

Charles said...

I dunno, Musk has some pretty weird ideas about how to "improve" things.

I hate social media in general, though, so I have no dog in this race.

motorrad said...

The anti-free speech CEO has now made it impossible to look at more than three tweets without an account. I don't have one and won't get one so I'm done even clicking on a link to Twitter. I will get an account if Musk takes it over. I know you dont trust him and I only trust him as much as I trust anyone other than my mother. But he obviously believes in free speech and he can buy and sell all of those blue check assholes a million times over. I love how he pokes those fucktards and it's so entertaining watching the left lose their minds. Again.

Scott

Kevin Kim said...

John,

You might be right.

Charles,

Agreed. Musk believes in the nonsense of Universal Basic Income; he's got Tesla factories and exhibition spaces in authoritarian China; he's given more money to Democrats than to Republicans. His Tesla Cybertruck proved to be an embarrassing failure in front of a studio audience, and his other, regular Teslas have been involved in numerous accidents. Musk does indeed have some weird ideas about what counts as "improvement," and as the above list of sins shows, he's a businessman first and foremost.

Motorrad,

Didn't know that about Twitter (the 3-tweet thing). Disturbing. And more evidence that Twitter needs to be burned to the ground.