What does Musk have in mind for Twitter? All speculation I have seen has been about free speech issues and similar. But can it be that he sees some kind of cross-pollination opportunities with his other companies? It has been his trademark, to use SpaceX to launch Starlink satellites, or put a Tesla on top of a rocket like a marketing stunt, etc. What can he do with Twitter once he controls it, in relationship to his other companies.
1. Improve the product (make Tweets editable for a period of time and things like that).
2. Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)
3. Open source the ranking/spam code on GitHub and accept PRs.
He explicitly stated that he does not view it as a money-making opportunity. His goals are altruistic.
It may be hard for some (cynical people) to believe that someone would do such a thing but I believe he's completely sincere. He's got the $40 billion to spare and thinks it's important to humanity's ability to progress. I agree.
The only reason Zuckerberg gave up on free speech for Facebook was that he was scared of losing revenue. Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.
1. He needs Tesla to be highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of renewable energy. It's expensive to build factories, etc.
2. He needs SpaceX to be highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of multi-planetary life. It's expensive to build rockets, etc.
3. He doesn't need Twitter to highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of making it a global free speech platform. It's relatively cheap to run an internet service.
You seem to have it backwards. He became a billionaire as a consequence of creating immensely valuable companies, not the other way around. And he risked the entirety of his previously earned fortune in order to so. These are facts that you can verify for yourself.
That he's not highly motivated by money or luxury, at least at this stage in his life, is obvious for anyone to see.
Yes clearly the billions of dollars, millions of adoring fans, and immense power he's acquired are an unfortunate side effect of him being a good samaritan.
The fact is that no one in history that has great things for humanity did so without having some degree of mixed motivations.
There's no inherent contradiction in wanting to make lots of money, become popular, become powerful, and do good things for other people all at the same time. In fact, it's a very common set of motivations among smart people.
The article is about shareholder value, not profitability. Anyway, that aside, the article was specifically written to address the people writing Elon Musk's off as "...a self-absorbed corporate carnival barker..." which is a conversation happening within the context of the Twitter takeover attempt; hence, "managerial excellence". Musk's choice to share the article clearly demonstrates that he believes his ability to drive shareholder value to be a defence of his "managerial" credentials.
Whether his intentions for taking over Twitter are altruistic or not, I don't know, personally I don't think it's profit driven (but definitely wouldn't describe it as altruistic...) but defending your managerial ability on the basis that you're a producer of shareholder value in a conversation about the ability to run a "global free speech platform" is nonsensical and undermines any proclamation he makes about his intentions.
Am Ithe only one who see’s value in Twitter’s uneditablity? To me it allows for only two class of tweets: Real & Fake. With the real one easily verifiable against a fake one (archive cross comparisons)
Editing tweets I think has value, even if for a short period of time. The biggest complaints people have are the meaning could change. Which is a fair point, but this is only a problem if you view it in the context of deception. People might write a very strongly worded statement in the moment, then decide to tone down what they’ve written. I don’t view this inherently as a bad thing.
There is no "gold standard" example of a social media platform, and never has been. They're all pretty crappy due to misaligned incentives between users and customers (advertisers). But despite that, some of them still manage to be useful and entertaining.
how can you be both honest / sincere and a "mixed bag"? it honestly reads to me like you're overlooking some big inconsistencies in his behavior "just because he's human". I would normally agree with - but considering his status as the world's richest man makes me think he should be held to a much higher standard
> how can you be both honest / sincere and a "mixed bag"?
Because people can be both honest and dishonest about different things or at different times. No one is perfectly honest and even the worst person is probably honest some of the time.
> ...considering his status as the world's richest man makes me think he should be held to a much higher standard
This makes sense in some ways and absolutely none at all in other ways. The richest man should be judged harshly for displaying greed, for example, but not for making mistakes that money doesn't help prevent.
Given his history of making statements which, if I am being generous, are wildly optimistic year after year while not allowing experience to impact what he is saying I have less faith that he will actually do what he says.
Value wise his other states goals would be far better advanced if he used that money to speed them along instead of buying Twitter.
Full and outright racism was 100% allowed on reddit up until a few years ago. Same with Facebook. Groups and subs dedicated solely to racist rhetoric were super common.
Hate speech (racism, bullying, threatening, harassment) might as well be thought of as illegal. It may not be illegal by the literal word of the law, but in the interpretation most people in practice treat these as illegal.
Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)
No large social network ever ran that way and I'm skeptical that any social network could be run that way and make a profit. Here are some of the things that are not actually illegal to publish under US law:
- Most forms of doxxing
- Adult nudity and pornography
- Most gore images and videos (industrial accidents, car crashes, corpses from war zones (including children), animal abuse...)
- Praise and promotional material for pedophilia
- Praise and encouragement for anorexia and other eating disorders
- Promotional material and instructions for suicide
- Praise and promotional material for terrorist groups like ISIS, as long as it doesn't call for "imminent lawless action." Much historically banned-by-bigtech ISIS propaganda was not actually illegal, which is why government officials urged companies to do something about it instead of just dispatching law enforcement.
- Spam that isn't delivered via email
- Coordinated foreign propaganda, e.g. "50 Cent Party" commenters piling on to criticize anyone who criticizes mainland China's government
- Jailbait images (in the sense of the banned-in-2011 subreddit r/jailbait)
A lot of things that 95% of Americans never want to see online are actually legal, just so widely reviled and moderated against that you rarely encounter them accidentally.
I think 99% of people would agree it's reasonable to have a very few, very clear exceptions. And it's possible to do so without falling down a slippery slope. We know this for a fact because sites like Reddit did it for over a decade, as did many other sites. It used to be that they didn't moderate content themselves for fear of losing their "common carrier" liability protection.
And many of these exceptions might not even necessarily even be exceptions to US law or the First Amendment. Abuse of computer systems (spam), Federal obscenity laws, etc.
And there are many potential approaches to hiding (with transparency) from view legal content that no one (or almost no one) actually wants to see, without necessarily even deleting it.
One obvious approach would be to allow users to dictate what kinds of content they want to see. An example is subreddits, where users who want to see gore could be free to do so. Twitter could implement similar kinds of self-moderation features.
There are probably even more creative approaches that could solve some of the echo chamber effects, misinformation, etc without heavy-handed global moderation. It's a hard problem but it'd be really great to see someone try at least.
It used to be that they didn't moderate content themselves for fear of losing their "common carrier" protection.
Reddit allowed porn from the beginning. Facebook never allowed nudity. Neither one of them had any common carrier protections to protect or to lose by these policies.
Reddit proves that even subreddits, personal filters, and other self-moderation tools are not enough to prevent politician, media, and advertiser pressure around controversial content. The jailbait subreddit, like every subreddit that has been banned, was full of willing subscribers.
I can't name any prominent American politicians who really want social media to publish everything that's allowed under the First Amendment. Do you know of any?
Some politicians say that they do but I don't believe they have considered the full scope of what is actually allowed under the First Amendment. For example, Senator Tom Cotton published an apparently fierce defense of free speech on his own web site in June 2020:
These social-media companies have improved the lives of Americans in many ways. But they should not be surprised public opinion is turning against them when they act as censors and moral scolds to millions of Americans. Nor should they expect to find many people rushing to their defense. In fact, to coin a phrase, those of us in their crosshairs might say: No quarter for Big Tech censorship.
However, in September 2020 he accused Netflix of distributing child pornography (the movie Cuties) and wrote:
Netflix has a basic legal responsibility to not stream child pornography or otherwise promote the sexual exploitation of children.
I don't think that he understands how broad the First Amendment actually is, and how narrow the exceptions for obscenity and child pornography are. He just wants to make tech companies stop censoring his tweets and start censoring movies. Likewise, many activists who are upset about (e.g.) LGBTQ content getting suppressed by YouTube algorithms don't much care about YouTube suppressing videos about guns and explosives.
There are few people except perhaps Constitutional scholars willing to defend the full breadth of what the First Amendment guards, much less require social networks to host content of similar breadth. I'm willing to defend the First Amendment as it currently exists, even the publications I find vilest, but I don't want social media forced to publish all of it.
I agree sites had different policies and I'm (intentionally) simplifying the history.
> Neither one of them had any common carrier protections to protect or to lose by these policies.
That is precisely the reason sites had a light moderation touch for years. I'm not sure where you're getting that from? The consensus (from lawyers I was advised by personally) was that too much moderation would open you up to liability, and so most social sites just enforced their ToS without wading into full scale moderation.
> I can't name any prominent American politicians who really want social media to publish everything that's allowed under the First Amendment. Do you know of any?
I'm sure there's probably at least one, but I have no interest in what politicians say they want. They're so often the people the Supreme Court is protecting us from. To me the question is what principles should guide us, and my answer is the First Amendment.
> I don't think that he understands how broad the First Amendment actually is...
I think he does understand how broad the First Amendment is. I also think he's probably much more willing to sacrifice short-term (or even long-term) revenue than most people would expect. I don't claim to know for sure though. And he might change his mind in the future.
What makes you think he is willing to sacrifice short term revenue?
- He's a businessman. You could argue that you need to be successful to have the resources to help people
- He sued Top Gear because of a somewhat negative car review of the original Tesla Roadster [1]. Would an advocate of free speech to the level some want here do that? Maybe he changed though, maybe he only wants free speech when it doesn't hurt him.
I'm honestly asking where the image of a champion of free speech comes from, besides what he says he'll do?
> What makes you think he is willing to sacrifice short term revenue?
Because we already know from his past behavior that he's willing to make long-term bets. And his statement that he doesn't view his interest in Twitter as a money-making venture.
> He sued Top Gear because of a somewhat negative car review of the original Tesla Roadster
That's a very biased way to frame it. IIRC Top Gear admits that they faked part of the review to make Tesla look bad, after Tesla proved that they had.
Believing in free speech doesn't mean you can't sue people that you believe have violated laws.
Or perhaps he simply made a mistake of judgement going after them legally and was wrong to do so. That's also not inconsistent with a belief in free speech.
> Believing in free speech doesn't mean you can't sue people that you believe have violated laws.
Musk doesn't just believe in free speech, he's called himself a “free speech absolutist”.
- One can either be a free speech absolutist, or not.
- If you are a free speech absolutist, you must take a position that all speech is permissible. Because if you don't then you aren't an absolutist, because one could then always take the absolute position that all speech is permissible.
- If you insist that it's okay to be an absolutist on free speech but still maintain that some speech is not permissible, then really we're not talking about free speech anymore but instead negotiating exactly what classes of speech are not permissible.
- Therefore, if Musk really is a free speech absolutist as he claims to be, he must support Top Gun's right to shamelessly lie about his product. As a matter of principle, libel is perfectly okay for a free speech absolutist. If you claim it's not, then I can find you a free speech absolutist who disagrees.
- Therefore Musk is either lying about his motives or he doesn't understand enough about the nuances of free speech to know he's doing. Either way he definitely shouldn't be trusted as a standard bearer or avatar for free speech.
Musk seems to have used the term "free speech absolutist" as a means of contrasting his First Amendment-style view of free speech with the severely qualified and diminished version currently available on platforms like Twitter.
So I agree that you're technically correct about what "absolutist" means, but I don't think it makes a difference in this case.
Anyone who is willing to run social media services as if they were bound by the First Amendment has my support. They may fail but at least they'd be trying to do the right thing, which is better than what we have today.
It's easy to project your hopes and dreams onto a person when you discount the meaning of their literal words and replace them with your own biases. I have no illusions that Musk's own conception of "free speech" is not just as qualified and diminished as what Twitter offers. If Musk had a legitimately impressive adherence to the principles of free speech, backed by deed, that would be one thing. If he could put his money where his mouth is in literally any other context, that would be a data point. But Musk's record on free speech is the opposite; he often uses the legal system as well as his own wealth to exert pressure which is anti-free speech. To be clear I'm not saying he is wrong to do this, but he's wrong on the basis of free speech. Indeed, Musk is very keen to restrict the speech of others when he feels that speech harms him. That's reasonable, but not principled.
Taken as a whole, to me this just indicates that Musk is not a free speech absolutist but instead a fair-weather supporter of free speech; he's for free speech when it works for him, but also anti-free speech when it works for him. This makes him no better or worse than anyone else IMO, but it certainly doesn't make him the standard bearer of free speech.
However, the thing that does make him worse than everyone else is that he lies about it. He calls himself a free speech absolutist knowing full well the meaning of those words. He's trying to paint himself as a champion when in fact he's not, which makes him either delusional or a manipulative liar. Either way, he shouldn't be the one at the helm of Twitter, if the rationale is that it would be a boom for free speech. It would just be more of the same. Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.
> It's easy to project your hopes and dreams onto a person when you discount the meaning of their literal words and replace them with your own biases. I have no illusions that Musk's own conception of "free speech" is not just as qualified and diminished as what Twitter offers.
Right there you're doing what you accuse me of doing, just in the opposite direction.
I will admit that I am doing that to some extent, but I feel I have some reason to believe I'm more likely to be right.
One major reason is that everything he has said seems to align with what was a very common viewpoint just a few years ago, which is best summarized by the Voltaire quote:
"I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
That's the sentiment behind the First Amendment and what I believe Elon Musk most likely believes in.
> ...which makes him either delusional or a manipulative liar
There are many more explanations for his past behavior other than him being delusional or a liar. He could have nuanced views, have simply failed to live up to his own ideals in specific instances, have justifications you can't imagine, etc. In any case, it's almost certainly a false dichotomy.
." Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)"
Maybe I'm too cynical but I really don't think Elon is doing this for some high minded free speech principles.
> He's got the $40 billion to spare
He really doesn't though, which is part of why I think this is all a big joke. The vast majority of his fortune is tied up in his ownership of several companies. The Tesla shares are the most liquid, but he's already borrowing a lot against them.
Is he really going to sell a large portion of his SpaceX or Tesla ownership to fund a Twitter lark? I doubt it.
No institutional investor is going to commit billions of dollars to an investment that is explicitly not about making money. The only way he raises third party money for the purchase is if those investors understand that Elon is lying.
> Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.
Musk talks a lot about pursuing projects out of principle rather than for profit, while his actions have lead to becoming the richest person in the world. Color me jaded, but I don't think one becomes
the richest person in the world without trying really hard to make money. Disguising it as magnanimous behavior only helps.
Your assertion that he doesn't have 40 billion to spare seems unfounded.
Let's look at some actual maths.
His net worth has soared in the last 2 years. Forbes (1) has a historical chart with his 2020 NW at 20 Billion, and current at 269 Billion. Is there any indication that his borrowings against his shares has increased in ratio with their appreciation. I can't find info on that but the forbes articles notes the borrowings were subtracted from that NW.
As to what his borrowings were, there's a few articles I found that he had .5 Billion of personal loans in 2020. Since then he sold a lot/all of his houses. His NW also increase by 500 times that amount. Just can't credit your assertion that he couldn't borrow $40 Billion at the drop of a hat with some of his increased 250B share value as collateral.
It is, but if this whole thing has taught us anything it's that there are a very large number of people in the US that only believe in free speech for themselves and their political allies.
