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.