Many people are wondering what the purpose and intentions are of Tesla CEO Elon Musk after reports drop that he has purchased over 9% of Twitter stock valued at $2.89 billion.
Last month, Musk asked his followers on the platform for their opinion of Twitter’s position on free speech. Now many people are wondering if the passive position purchased by Musk will be used to leverage a change in the Big Tech platform.
(CNBC) – Outspoken Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased a giant stake in Twitter that makes him the largest outside shareholder in the social media stock, not long after criticizing the company for what he said was its failure to uphold the tenets of free speech.
Musk owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, which represents a 9.2% passive stake in the company, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission 13G filing released Monday. The stake is worth $2.89 billion, based Twitter’s closing price Friday.
The purchase comes less than two weeks after Musk criticized the company, polling people on Twitter about whether it adheres to free speech principles. “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” Musk tweeted. “What should be done?” (read more)
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hasn’t even done anything with it yet, but after effectively becoming the largest shareholder of Twitter, a lot of doors that were locked shut suddenly flew open.
Musk took his status as the richest man in the world and used his wealth to purchase up a massive chunk of shares to one of the most influential and yet diseased social media platforms in the west. He obtained 9.2 percent of the company, in fact, and the resulting control shift sent Twitter’s stock skyrocketing like a SpaceX rocket — a whopping 25 percent.
(BREAKING: Elon Musk Makes a Huge Move Buying up Billions in Twitter Stock)
The move had been teased with Musk making the statement that “Free speech is essential to a functioning Democracy,” followed by questions about what should be done about Twitter, the “de facto public town square.” Musk, as he tends to do, made a move that changes everything not long after.
The question now is: What will Musk change and how will that change us?
Firstly, we need to focus on something that another famous man once said. The comedian Dave Chappelle commented that he was being mobbed by transgender activists on Twitter after being accused of being “transphobic.” He commented that he didn’t care, because Twitter isn’t a real place, and he’s right.
It doesn’t mean it can’t be.
For years, people were thrown off the platform for merely saying things that rubbed the hard-left sentiments of Twitter’s hard-left employees the wrong way. It became increasingly clear that Twitter’s terms of service were, like the pirate’s code, more guidelines than actual rules. If someone said something that hurt the ego, the Twitter employee could somehow label the person saying it as dangerous and have them banned.
One notable example is Carpe Donktum, a conservative meme maker who oftentimes created hilarious and effective videos that made the left look bad and Trump look good. Donktum never actually did anything wrong and if he broke any rules he complied with Twitter’s takedown demands. At one point, he made a hilarious video about CNN’s habit of misreporting the news. Twitter told him to take it down after the creator of the original video requested it, which Donktum did. A few days later Twitter issued him a suspension notice out of nowhere with no way to get his account back.
As Jennifer Van Laar commented at the time, despite complying with every demand of Twitter and never actually breaking any rules, Donktum was tossed off the platform in 2020. He was banned, not for breaking any rules but because he was capable of doing something the left couldn’t do, and that was effectively making people laugh at his political opposites.
Two years prior to this in 2018, I covered how the bias at Twitter had grown out of control to the point where actual threats were being made against the children of right-wing figures and Twitter was doing absolutely nothing about it. Meanwhile, they were suspending conservatives for merely stating that Islamic extremists were committing violence against the innocent, which they were. This was accompanied by footage from Project Veritas that showed employees admitting they were banning pro-Trump Twitter users off of the platform for simply being pro-Trump.
Most recently, the satirists at Babylon Bee had their account suspended for making a joke about Rachel Levine, the transgender activist currently serving as our nation’s Assistant Secretary of Health, being “man of the year.” They’ve refused to take the offending tweet down.
Chappelle’s comment that Twitter isn’t a real place is correct, but that statement is only correct because the town square is controlled so tightly by leftists that the conversation became artificial. There are far fewer right-leaning voices on the platform than there were a decade ago and those of us that are still there are limited in terms of what we can say.
Musk can end the tyrannical hold on the conversation and, to be sure, that seems to be his aim.
How or when he’ll start to do this is still up in the air, but judging by Musk’s love of doing things instead of complaining about them, the changes may happen rapidly. When they do, the town square will become more full than it’s ever been, and what’s more, even louder than before.
No longer will the leftists on Twitter have their home-field advantage. They can’t rely on Twitter to silence their opposition for them, and conversations will have to take place on equal ground. Many of those who were kicked off the platform will come flooding back and the left will be forced to engage with more voices who won’t be silenced for speaking the truth now. For a time, the platform will become a warzone of ideas that I’m not sure the radical leftists who rule the platform can win.
I’ve spoken before of a second Rennaisance that would need to occur in our society in order to get it back on track. It would begin when the people decide they’d had enough of the nonsense we see when we get online from activists of every kind. I said something would have to break eventually.
It did with Musk’s takeover of Twitter:
Today we can look around see that things are in a state of pure lunacy. Just logging onto a social media website opens up a world where the news is selling you blood and conflict amidst a population that gobbles it up while signaling virtue after virtue and offering little to nothing in terms of real substance. We have regressed as Sagan said, but something is going to break. People are going to get tired of the nonsense and noise and look for a better way. They’ll refuse to slide back any further, turning, instead, to the wisdom of those who came before us in order to pave the road ahead with knowledge and a thirst for something better.
The second renaissance may not happen today or even in the next few years, but I do believe it’s on the horizon. Humanity has never been one to love wallowing in the mud for long, and soon society will reject those who wish to keep us there and move on to something greater.
Musk’s purchasing of Twitter may be the first sign of a second Rennaisance. Opening up the town square for free discussion is a big deal, and without the careful curating of the radical left, society will be shown ideas and concepts that they hadn’t previously been allowed to see or openly talk about.
Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be pretty, at least at first. Freedom and chaos are cousins and the tumultuousness of having so many opposing voices added all at once will cause quite an uproar, but eventually, that will level out. From there, the open debate will allow good ideas to float to the top, and with good ideas shining as they should, society may very well find itself changing along with it.
Actual science may shine through, biology respected, jokes allowed to be made freely again, sacred cows demolished left and right, and much, much more.
The future is much brighter.