Buying the Bird: Elon Musk Purchases Twitter

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter Inc. was accepted. After Musk’s tumultuous takeover, Twitter is seeing a shift in its company culture. 

Musk has presented a lot of small and grand ideas of what he will do to Twitter, which has sparked great controversy throughout the nation. 

 In Musk’s mind, “Twitter serves as the de facto public town square,” and as such, it should be a place where people are able to speak their minds.

Musk has repeatedly stated that he opposes censorship and content moderation rules and will limit them. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist.”.

Musk repeatedly expressed his desire to improve free speech on Twitter in the weeks following his acquisition of the social media platform in April, and to unlock its “extraordinary potential.” 

Jacob Leland, an English teacher at the School, shares his opinion of Musk’s take on free speech on Twitter. Leland says that “Twitter has long been a haven for hate speech, falsehoods, sexism, and other negative ideologies. It has… conflated the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of speech with the unfettered right to say whatever it wants to (or at least whatever won’t get in the way of its real objective, which is to increase profits for its stockholders)..”

In May, Musk also talked about allowing former President, Donald Trump, back on Twitter as well as shaking up the company’s business model and finding new revenue sources. “I think it was a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme,” Musk said about Trump’s ban on Twitter, during an interview at a Future of the Car event.

  The tech billionaire’s ability to exercise more control over our economy and our politics is dangerous. Through Twitter, he is able to promote his businesses and political ideologies very effectively, which makes him an even more dangerous person than the industrial-era moguls.

By understanding media and market dynamics in this era – meme stocks, day trading, instant communications, and misinformation – Musk is able to enhance the effectiveness of such instant communications.

The future of Twitter is yet to be determined. However, the start is wary with big ambitions that seem implausible. Over time, it will become clear if Musk will be able to successfully revive these old ideas, and his new ones, but for now, we can only hypothesize.