Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company…
— from PRNewswire.com, April 25, 2022
Who would have guessed that Twitter was worth $44 billion dollars? Not me. I thought it was just a website, like the Pagosa Daily Post, but with more users.
But apparently Elon Musk thinks it’s worth that much, and I will admit (begrudgingly) that Elon Musk is probably a lot smarter than me, considering that his company, Tesla, has sold 1,917,450 cars that don’t even have gas tanks.
The deal was announced yesterday, after two weeks of negotiations. Reportedly, billionaire Musk didn’t like some of Twitter’s policies around freedom of speech, and its habit of ‘deplatforming’ users — like Donald Trump — who were allegedly spreading misinformation. The federal government and its friends on Wall Street don’t approve of other people spreading misinformation; they think of that as their own private prerogative.
Of course, we can blame the Founding Fathers for the wacky idea that everyone ought to be able to express their opinions in public. The British Army fought like hell to keep that from happening, but in the end, George Washington and his ragtag Continental troops — assisted by well-trained French soldiers under Comte de Rochambeau, and the French West Indies fleet commanded by Comte de Grasse — caught British General Charles Cornwallis in Yorktown with his pants down, so to speak.
Something I wasn’t taught in school: Comte de Grasse arrived with 500,000 silver pesos collected from the citizens of Havana, Cuba, to help meet payroll for the Continental Army. That’s the equivalent of about $13 million 2022 dollars. Not bad, for a bunch of future communists.
The ‘freedom of speech’ idea was made even worse by its partner in crime, the ‘freedom of the press’. Not only could a person say whatever they wanted — publicly — but a newspaper could now legally published “All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print”. How this country lasted for 246 years, I will never know. Partly, Americans just got used to the idea that everyone was probably lying, but we could believe someone, if they were saying something we agreed with.
Which might explain how Elon Musk amassed 80 million Twitter followers, even prior to buying the company. He says things that 80 million people agree with.
For example, he says that his decision to buy Twitter is “not about money”. Most of us can feel pretty good about a man worth $259 billion telling us that his latest business decision is not about money.
Elizabeth Dwoskin, a reporter for The Washington Post, unknowingly agreed with me during an NPR interview yesterday.
Yes, he has said it is not about money, repeatedly.
I think you have to take him at his word that, in the last year, he has become fairly obsessed with talking about ideas about free speech and the digital town square and the power of platforms like Twitter. And he wants to control that.
And I will also put in that he is probably the savviest marketer in the world. And his own personal marketing mechanism is his own 80 million-plus Twitter follower presence online. So this is also buying his own marketing machine.
We will recall, in passing, that The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, a man worth $190 billion and who has already been to outer space.
While Mr. Bezos and The Washington Post are benefiting from freedom of the press, Mr. Musk apparently wants to bring freedom of speech to Twitter, a company that had decided (like the British) that free speech was a bad idea.
From a PRNewswire.com posting:
“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,” said Mr. Musk. “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.”
Mr. Musk is here pointing out a little problem with social media. An awful lot of the postings are not coming from humans; they’re coming from ‘spam bots’. Unlike humans, spam bots will say practically anything without even feeling guilty. They don’t even care if anyone ‘Likes’ their post. They will lie through their teeth and smile while they do it. (Except they actually don’t have teeth.)
Luckily, Mr. Muck is a very wealthy person, because it might be an expensive proposition to authenticate all humans. There’s a lot of us.