Elon's playground
The back and forth between Elon and Twitter seems to have taken another interesting turn.
If you lost track:
Elon got invited to join Twitter’s board
Elon accepts, it’s announced, Jack & Parag (the current CEO) tweet out celebration
Elon changes his mind. Says no to joining the board
Elon decides to just buy the whole company instead (boss move)
Elon changes his mind again.
Elon uses “bots” as an excuse as to why he didn’t want to buy twitter again (with speculation buzzing that it was because the stock market crashed, and his offer price was too high)
Elon tries to backout of the deal
Twitter sues him, trying to force him to buy it
…then on Monday, Elon “announced” he’s going to buy it at the original price ($44B)
This was news along with a dump of Elon Musk text messages that made it crystal clear he's about to clean house.
You can hear the snowflakes screaming.
Apart from liberal tearing up, given that it’s one of the most influential figures in this times, the text exchanges are revealing, irreverent, and extremely fun. They’re also a rare look into the inner workings of Silicon Valley dealmaking, giving us some insight into Musk’s process and how he lost interest in this prized acquisition.
The text that stood out was Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale to Elon saying:
I love your “Twitter algorithm should be open source” tweet - I’m actually speaking to over 100 members of congress tomorrow at GOP policy retreat and this is one of the ideas I’m pushing for reigning in crazy big tech. Now I can cite you so I’ll sound less crazy myself :) Our public square needs to not have arbitrary sketchy censorship.
Elon replies: Absolutely
Elon again: What we have right now is hidden corruption!
This implies that controlling Twitter means accumulating great political power.
So of course the 'liberals' and MSM that are obsessed with censoring anyone who does agree with them are freaking out.
According to the Washington Post, employees see a 'dark future' ahead,
Many employees think of Twitter as a higher calling as much as it is a job and have felt betrayed by executives who they believed prioritized shareholder earnings over what’s best for the service.
“There’s a difference between what the board wants and what employees think is best,” Brandon Borrman, the company’s former communications chief, said in an interview. “People forget that most people that work at Twitter do so because they believe in the company’s mission — and they want to protect it from anybody. Whether they can do that remains to be seen.”
Others said they couldn’t stand and didn’t trust Musk.
“It’s a win for leadership in Twitter getting fat payouts,” said one Twitter employee who opposed Musk’s ownership, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to discuss internal matters. “But the regular Twitter employee will now have a wholly unqualified CEO who suffers from crippling Dunning-Kruger and will use this to make the world a worse place.” (Dunning-Kruger is a cognitive bias in which people think they are smarter than they are.)
We are left to watch this drama unfold between a 'Dark future' (their own words) of liberals dictating the rules of the digital public square along with mass cancelation and speech policing or a less censorious future prone with heavy data gathering/mining (ML/AI) capabilities.
I honestly am confused as both options appear to hasten a digital gulag ahead.
See you tomorrow!
- Ope