Elon Musk & Twitter
Good morning. In April 2022 Elon Musk announced that he wanted to buy twitter. He made an offer which Twitter’s board reacted to by creating a ‘poison pill’ (this meant that an acquisition of more than 15% of the company would trigger a flood of shares to be released into the market - it is a device used by companies to prevent hostile takeovers). On 25th April 2022, Twitter’s board accepted Musk’s offer to buy the company for $44 billion.
That’s quite a lot of money! Especially for one man to wield!
I have listened to a couple of interviews that Elon gave recently with the TED interviewer Chris Anderson. In the interview Elon explained his position on Twitter:
Buying twitter is not about making money for Elon
He sees Twitter as the world’s de facto public square
He thinks that people having trust in twitter is key to the prospects of democracy throughout the world
He thinks that freedom of speech is key to the functioning of democracy
He says that hearing someone you don’t like say something that you don’t like is an indication that there is freedom of speech in your country
Elon wants to make the algorithm which promotes and demotes tweets open to the public and also wants to be open when a tweet has been promoted/demoted by an algorithm or manually
Elon wants to introduce an edit button to twitter
He wants to get rid of ‘bot armies’
Elon thinks that if a tweet lands in a ‘grey area’ then the tweet should stand
If a tweet is particularly controversial then it should not necessarily be removed, though it might be right not to promote that tweet
Also talked about during the interview, on topics slightly separate from Twitter, were:
The fact that Elon is obsessed with the truth and always has been
Elon wants to build a future people can get excited about
Elon wants people to wake up in the morning and be excited about the day ahead
Part of Elon’s philosophy comes from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is that it is more important to find the right questions to ask than to find the correct answers (this is something that I’ve also heard from Roger Scruton!).
In summary, Elon Musk bought twitter for $44 billion in April 2022. He bought the company because he is concerned about freedom of speech and he wants to build trust in the company by making clear when tweets have been promoted/demoted manually or algorithmically, making the algorithm open source, and by getting rid of the ‘bot armies’. In addition, Elon is obsessed with the truth, he wants people to wake up in the morning and feel excited about living, and he believes that sometimes finding the right question is more important than finding the right answer.