The Left went into full freakout mode when Elon Musk made his bid for Twitter. Then they went into full freakout mode when Musk had second thoughts. Then they went into full freakout mode when it looked like the deal was back on.
At some point it becomes a form of entertainment. What will the Left freak out about today? There are so many triggers.
A few years back I would never have believed that Elon Musk would become a boogyman for the Left because he seemed so green. However, Musk got red-pilled along the way and now even his solar, battery, and electric car credentials won’t save him from attempted cancellations by Leftists who care more about censoring their enemies than reducing CO2 emissions.
Some liberals have entered the bargaining stage of grief over Musk’s purchase of Twitter, with POLITICO’s Senior Media Writer Jack Shafer taking the lead. Schafer is doing his best to convince Musk that allowing freer speech on Twitter would amount to putting $44 billion into a pile and lighting it on fire. And surely Musk, a savvy businessman, would never do that. Right? Right?!
Assuming Elon Musk and Twitter can iron out their legal differences in the next couple of days, he will take ownership of Twitter very soon. Will he wreck it by turning it into a disinformation playground, as some critics fear, based on his vow to lift the permanent ban on Donald Trump’s account? Or will he transform it into something that rivals the other triumphs in his portfolio, Tesla and SpaceX?
Knowing Musk, he could possibly do both, constructing a sewer that poisons you with lies and hate while making it an essential part of consumers’ lives. But you’ve really got to doubt that. Nobody, not even Elon Musk on his most perverse day, would buy a property for $44 billion — 20 percent of his net worth, by the way — and then rebuild it as the world’s largest sewage treatment facility. All the fretting about the “harm” Musk might cause as Twitter’s owner is misplaced: It will be in his financial interests to make Twitter as wholesome and welcoming a place as Starbucks, even if he changes the way the site works.
Twitter ever becoming wholesome and welcoming is about as likely as Sodom and Gomorrah having ever become convents. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Twitter today is precisely the sewer that Shafer fears it will become, only with somewhat fewer conservatives than Musk might allow. And should Musk allow more free speech, as I hope he does, it will neither become more wholesome nor more of a sewer than it is today. Twitter is designed to be a place where partisans slag each other while reporters monitor the carnage…sprinkled with some links to articles and breaking news. Nothing will or could change that.
Twitter’s character limit combined with its immediacy make this inevitable. No substantial argument could possibly be made, even with threads. If you reduced Twitter’s population to Quaker,s fights would soon break out over what dishes are best to serve at Church functions. Maybe the Amish could make Twitter a nice place to visit?
So much of the speculation about what Musk will do with Twitter has been based on the dumb things that come out of his big mouth with such regularity — like downplaying the pandemic in March 2020, posting that “pronouns suck,” that he was supporting Kanye West’s presidential campaign, or that one of the Thai cave rescuers was a “pedo guy.” If ever there was a person in need of an editor or a gag order, it’s Musk.
But countervailing the things Musk says are the things Musk does, which deserve as much if not more attention than his bloviating. And not just his achievements. The Musk resume overflows with one astonishing failure after another. He was fired as CEO of a company he founded. He was kicked out of PayPal, which he helped start. Six SpaceX rocket launches have failed and multiple landings have ended in explosions. Tesla almost went bankrupt during the rollout of the Model 3.
Hey, Elon you loser, if you make Twitter less palatable than I would like, it might wind up being as much of a failure as SpaceX or Tesla! You wouldn’t want to be even more of a loser than you are, right? (No word yet about how loser Elon can afford to buy Twitter with only 20% of his net worth).
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Musk’s tendency to shoot off his mouth regularly, fail like clockwork and overpromise like a confidence man makes predicting his future a mug’s game. But he also provides ample evidence that beyond these faults, when he takes huge risks, he’s better at learning from his mistakes than anybody in business. If past is prologue, Twitter will explode on liftoff, crash on return and become a metaphor for a fireball once Musk gets his hands on it. Prepare yourself.
If Elon fails like clockwork, I need me some of that recurring failure.
Now Shafer is right that Elon Musk is a modern day PT Barnum of sorts, but he ignores that Musk is also as successful as Edison at building industries that persist and grow more than just about anything. You’ve heard of General Electric? Yeah, that Edison. And for those of you who think Musk’s success was built on the work of people he employs…you are right. The same was true of Edison, for the most part. That was part of his genius–and he had more than a bit of PT Barnum as well. The man electrocuted an elephant to win an argument, for God’s sake.
And this is where Shafer turns to his bargaining. He rightly understands that Elon Musk wants to make money, that phony failure that he is, and if he wants to do that he will have to become like…Chinese WeChat! Liberals love them some Chinese censorship and social credit systems:
Insufficient attention has been paid to his ambition to turn Twitter into a super app like China’s phenomenally successful WeChat, where you bank, book travel, hail rides, order food, buy stuff, pay bills, make appointments, send messages and handle the other web-adjacent minutia of modern living. Making Twitter a super app is what Salesforce founder Marc Benioff was jabbering about in the text message that surfaced in ongoing litigation last week. Wrote Benioff, “Twitter conversational OS — the townsquare for your digital life.”
Turning Twitter into your personal operating system makes sense as a business proposition. It also justifies the $44 billion Musk has pledged to buy it. As a stand-alone social media app, it’s not worth that sort of money (even if he truly desires to create a free speech haven). If creating a super app is Musk’s intention, he must understand that few people will want to do their banking on a site that’s associated with white supremacism. He might not choose to ban every form of “harmful” speech, but he’ll have every incentive to make Twitter palatable to the masses as he transforms it.
The great irony of all this is that the White Supremacy the liberals are always warning us about hardly exists. Sure, there are fringe groups and individuals out there, but a quick tour through Leftist Twitter reveals a whole ecosystem of hate and violent wish casting. I’m not sure whether the establishment Left just ignores it, or whether they think it is just fine or even admirable. The Left has an entire infrastructure of shock troops they tolerate or even applaud, all while scaring the normals about roving bands of white nationalists.
I have been involved in conservative politics for 30 years and have yet to meet a white nationalist. I don’t doubt they exist, because idiots of all stripes exist. But as a Minneapolis resident I saw thousands of Leftists burning down parts of my city. As people are getting shot left and right here, our Democrats worked to defund our police.
Shafer’s piece isn’t entire wrong–Musk likes to make money and won’t want to lose his shirt on Twitter. But most of his piece is fantasy (Musk the total failure) and wishful thinking.
I have no idea how well a Musk-owned Twitter will work out. I know that the entire Left-media infrastructure will comb the billions of tweets looking for crazies to blame on Elon, and they will find or invent them.
But will it matter? Probably not. After the MSM’s limited attention span turns them back to fake hate crimes and Donald Trump’s non-indictments, Twitter will remain a popular and nasty place. There is no alternative on the horizon, and there is always a market for snark and breaking news.
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