Musk Buys Twitter

It's been in the financial news for a couple of weeks now, but on Monday 25 April 2022 Elon Musk became the owner of Twitter for a measly $44 billion. I say "measly" only because his current estimated fortune is more than $250 billion.

With this purchase, Musk is taking Twitter private; he becomes the sole owner who will decide what happens on the platform. If you've read my blogs on Musk, you know I'm not a fan, to say the least. And I believe we can all agree that it's not great that Twitter, one of the world's biggest social platforms, is now 100% controlled by one billionaire. It's like a benevolent dictatorship; even if the current dictator is indeed benevolent, who says the next one will be. On the other hand, that's not changing a lot compared to the current state of affairs; it doesn't matter that much if it's a board of directors or a single director who decides who's allowed to say what.

And I'm inclined to give Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt for now, as the statements he's made in the run-up to this takeover have been encouraging:

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in a statement. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."
_{source: MSN}

So yeah, maybe his dictatorship will be a benevolent one. The ball is in his court now. Still, this should make us pause and think about the world we live in, where one individual can wield so much power. What's funny is the criticisms coming from staffers of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, who sounded the alarm when news of Musk's intended takeover of Twitter broke. Here's a response from Washington Post columnist Max Boot:

"The notion that content moderation is communism or fascism is typical of the inanities that pervade social media. If this were true, it would mean that the United States was under fascist rule when I was growing up in the 1980s. Back then, most people got their news from a daily newspaper or one of three major TV networks. All of them employed editors (a.k.a. content moderators) who would have never run the kind of wild-eyed claims that have become a mainstay on social media. Anyone who thinks the problem with social media is too much content moderation, rather than too little, should not own one of the most powerful platforms online."
_{source: Fox News}

Obviously speculations about Musk's real intentions for taking over Twitter are rampant, with some even claiming that his end-game is to use Twitter to bolster Bitcoin, something he also has a large stake in. Claims by Musk in the past that Twitter had inhibited his free speech are, in my opinion, bunk and can be added to the large pile of pearl-clutching "cancel culture" nonsense. Free speech of celebrities and billionaires is never "canceled" and no one should believe that nonsense; it's regular working-class people whose speech is inhibited, which has been true for centuries. But like I said: the ball's in Elon's court now; only time will tell what he'll do with it.

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