But either way, the same fact delights one side and terrifies the other: One guy will get to radically reshape this platform in his own image, and he seems to be doing so mostly for fun, and possibly for profit.
He has stated that he disagrees with the current content-moderation policies, which has led to yet another round of the sort of mind-numbing culture-war discourse the site so effectively fosters: Will Musk allow any sort of speech - even Nazis? Why are liberals so afraid of free speech? Back and forth all day like this.
Twitter, by contrast, is a site where you can log on and say more or less whatever you want, and Musk has said he would like to make it even more that way. Whatever you make of all this, each of these publications has an editorial staff with a great degree of independence, constrained by journalistic norms created over decades - and often enforced on Twitter. All the while, Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire widow of Steve Jobs, has been making media investments of her own, most prominently The Atlantic. Five years later, the investment firm controlled by Patrick Soon-Shiong - like Musk, a billionaire businessman from South Africa - bought The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune for around $500 million. In 2013, Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for the comparatively minuscule sum of $250 million. Perhaps you’ve noticed that it’s been happening a lot lately. It is in one sense simply another instance of a familiar story: Billionaire buys important vector for public discourse. The rapid growth of his wealth has coincided with his embrace of the platform as a chaotic communication tool, making the acquisition almost painfully recursive - his billions are tied up with his eccentric persona, and now he is using the billions to wholly own the arena that allows him to bring his unvarnished self to the masses. And yet, if you turned the clock back to just 2018, $21 billion would represent 100 percent of Musk’s net worth. If he took that money and set it on fire, he would still be the richest person on the planet. According to filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk will personally supply as much as $21 billion in cash to close out the deal, representing about 8 percent of his net worth. It’s surprising that Musk would stake so much of his wealth on a site that so many of its users profess to hate. He also thinks the number 420 is so funny that he seems to have determined the final value of his offer ($54.20 per share) to accommodate its inclusion. No one in the history of the modern world has ever been as wealthy as he is. He has more followers than Narendra Modi, the prime minister of the largest democracy on Earth, and fewer than Taylor Swift. Thanks to the flattening effects of Twitter, the only real difference between the site’s median user and Musk is about $257 billion and 85.4 million followers.
He likes to joke around, but isn’t as funny as he thinks he is he overshares and loves memes he occasionally goes too far, and gets himself in trouble he seems to think the platform is unfairly suppressing the views of people with whom he identifies. In many ways, Elon Musk uses Twitter like the rest of us.