Is Elon Musk a free speech champion or a bombastic fool? Perhaps, he’s both
Finally, it has happened. In a story with more drama and grandstanding than Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Elon Musk has bought Twitter for $44bn. The man himself announced the success of his deal in a tweet – of course. He has also dubbed himself “Chief Twit”, with which some may agree for the wrong reasons. There seems already to have been an exodus of senior management at the social media site.
Musk’s ostensible motivation is to protect and enhance free speech. He has criticised Twitter in the past for overly sensitive moderation. Last week he tweeted that it is “important for the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square”. But he has also warned against the polarisation of public debate and expressed concern that social media could shrink to “far-left and far-right echo chambers”. Cynical readers may think he is coming late to this party.
Is anything going to change? Musk’s first appeal was to Twitter’s advertising customers, which suggests he is focusing for now on shoring up the company’s existing financial base. But that well may be starting to run dry. Other tech giants like Alphabet and Meta are finding that the global economic situation is taking its toll on advertising spend, and if Musk wants Twitter to have a sustainable long-term future he may have to think more creatively.
From the ordinary user’s point of view, it’s not clear how different Twitter will become, at least for now. Musk’s message to advertisers also pledged not to turn the platform into a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said without consequences”.
This suggests that he has already run into the perennial dilemma of free speech. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr summed it up incredibly well for the Supreme Court as far back as 1919, when he said that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting ‘fire’ in a theatre and causing a panic.”
Musk has made it clear that his acquisition of Twitter is not driven by financial considerations. He declared that he didn’t conclude this deal “to make money”, and he has accepted that his goal of creating a “digital town square” may fail. But this is characteristic of Musk. We are programmed to believe that the wealthy pursue yet more wealth, but Musk, worth around $210bn, is so far into the realm of unprecedented riches that his motivation is not easy to discern.
He has reached a level of wealth which allows him to do almost anything he wants, however apparently grandiose. In 2020 his SpaceX enterprise became the first private company to put astronauts into orbit and dock with the International Space Station.
Some have concerns over his stewardship of Twitter. Rumours abound that he will restore Donald Trump’s account, deleted when the former president was held to have incited the violent attacks on the Capitol in January 2021, or that of his friend Kanye West, removed for anti-Semitic remarks.
Such actions would dismay many progressives, but one has to remember that Twitter has no problems with the account operated by Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, who has 1.1 million followers.
Musk also said last week that buying Twitter is “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” He is never a man short of ambition, and he has spoken warmly of China’s WeChat application, which serves as a single platform to read news, pay taxes, book doctor’s appointments, hail taxis and many other daily activities. Is this the real play?
The joy, or frustration, of following Elon Musk lies in his unpredictability. Perhaps his acquisition of Twitter is simply a stepping stone to an all-conquering gateway app. Or perhaps he is spending almost unintelligible sums of money on a pet project to defend free speech. Given his track record, however, it’s not utterly impossible that he will somehow contrive to do both.