Elon Musk Buys Twitter

I am very excited that it looks like Elon Musk and a group of like-minded individuals is on track to buy Twitter and take it private.

I love Twitter. It's not the most popular platform, but there are a lot of important influencers, politicians, and newspeople on it. I often get breaking news on Twitter well before I see it anywhere else. Of course, there's a lot of fake news, bias, and satire on Twitter as well, so you need to follow the links and do more research to understand what's actually going on, but Twitter will often break it first.

Twitter is also great to hear directly from individuals involved in stories. Of course they may be lying to you, but you need to hear both sides of a story, and the individual posting their interpretation of events on Twitter, directly, is a very valuable part of that.

There are also many sub-cultures on Twitter that you can include into your bubble.  There is definitely a spanking twitter, a trad-wife twitter, lots of health twitters, and so on.

Twitter needs an "algorithm" to be at all interesting. If you follow people, and you just get an unfiltered time-ordered feed of what they tweet, it's exceptionally boring. A competing platform had the ability to turn off the algo, and it was horribly boring.

To keep things lively, the Twitter algo cleverly decides what to show you on your timeline. It's impacted by who you follow; tweets you like, respond to, and retweet; tweets that get a lot of likes and replies; tweets by people who you follow, follow; tweets from people opposite of the people you follow. I think it tries really, really hard to give you an interesting timeline.

Hower, the "dark side" of the algo is that it can bias the conversation or favour one political view over another. For example they can look for posts that have right wings things in them like "America" or "MAGA" and lower their reach. Twitter also engages in a practice called "shadowbanning" where a disfavoured user is put on a list, and the reach of their tweets is severely limited. I'm not sure the extent this happens on the left, but it happens a lot on the right.

The trouble is, all of this stuff is kept secret. If you are shadowbanned, you are not told you are shadowbanned (but tech has been written that can analyze these things and give you a strong indication). The workings of the algo are not revealed at all, but can be reverse engineered to a certain extent.

And Twitter employees, as for most Big Tech, are heavily, heavily Democrat, as demonstrated by the ratio of political donations of their employees. Almost 99%.

Imagine you are lonely conservative voice inside of Twitter. You'd be shut down and marginalized so fast. The 99% "groupthink" would dominate, and they would egg each other on to worse and worse excesses. That much one-sided bias is never good.

Of course, Twitter must moderate its content to a certain extent. Various countries have various laws that curtail free speech that must be respected if you wish to operate in those countries. However, Twitter goes well beyond this in their content moderation. They include "hate speech" without a clear definition of what that is. While we can all agree on the more egregious cases, it gets fuzzy around the edges. For example, Twitter declares that any position that does not 100% respect the radical trans agenda is "hate speech".

The content moderation policies now also include "misinformation". Again, on the most egregious cases we can be in agreement. However, Twitter takes controversial topics, such as COVID, war on Ukraine, Hunter Biden's laptop, Jan 6 "insurrection", election rigging (but only the 2020 election, not 2016), and brands the conservative side of these issues as "misinformation". They very much have egg on their faces, however, as many things they branded as misinformation have since been demonstrated to be true (Hunter's laptop and COVID vaccine limitations to name two).

Free speech advocates believe the antidote to bad speech is more speech, not censorship. And again, don't take it to the extreme. If you just get a lefty yelling "Nazi! Nazi! Nazi!", yeah, get rid of them or shadowban them (but let them know and why), or a white supremacist hating on Jews and POC, then the same. I'm not talking about that (but admit that "where's the line" is a tough question: no easy answers).

But Twitter's content moderation policies are horribly opaque. Their guidelines are vague, and when a tweet or user is flagged, there is often no information about which tweet or why a tweet was moderated. There is a very opaque appeals process. And there are lifetime bans of users without appeal.

The most notable banning was President Trump himself, ostensibly for issues surrounding Jan 6 and his statements of the election being rigged. But really, they just wanted to take a political adversary off the field, obviously. They actually lifetime banned the sitting president of the USA, an important political figure with the support of about 50% of the population. If that is not rampant political manipulation at the highest level, I don't know what is. And yet Trump has been charged with no crime, and there has yet to emerge any credible evidence whatosever that he had anything to do with instigating a riot. Yes, he directly and literally called for "peaceful and patriotic protests" to protest the outcome of the election which he believed was rigged. The Democrats did the same in 2016 and perpetrated a related "Russian Collusion Hoax" for years afterwards. If Twitter didn't have double-standards it would have no standards at all. Twitter has also systematically removed prominent conservative America First influencers, often for vague reasons. I do not believe we see this happening to the same extent to the left, but if you know of counter-examples, please share them.

Twitter makes money by occasionally showing you a relevant add in your timeline. Every time its presented to you, the advertiser pays Twitter. Every time you engage with it, the advertiser pays Twitter. Customers can also pay for Twitter to conduct surveys. The amount of revenue is therefore directly impacted by the number of users on the platform and their demographic.

Twitter was co-founded by its first CEO, Jack Dorsey, in 2006.

In 2013 it went public at a valuation of $31B. Here is how it has done since.

The current value of the company is $37.5B. The stock initially dropped from $70/share post-IP down to $20/share in 2017. Since then it has crept back up. At the start of March it had fallen back down to $33/share and was poised to head lower as it was expected its revenues would be lower than already low expectations.

That is when Elon Musk stepped in.

Who is Elon Musk? He was born to a Canadian mother and a South African father and was raised in South Africa. He came from a middle-class well-to-do, but not extremely wealthy family. He went to Stanford but then dropped out to co-found an early web software company called Zip2 with his brother. The company was acquired for $300M in 1999. With that money he co-founded an online bank that later merged with another and formed PayPal which was sold to eBay for $1.5B. He then used that money to found SpaceX and Tesla and subsequently several other innovative companies. He has a history of keeping all his money in the companies he founded, and very nearly lost it all in the early days of SpaceX and Tesla, putting his entire wealth on the line. Elon is now the richest man in the world with an estimated net worth of $250B, mostly tied up in his own companies' stock. Recently he paid the highest tax bill ever paid by any individual in history of $11B. And whever he tries to realize his wealth by selling shares, he'll be paying a lot more.

Elon began silently buying Twitter shares on Jan 31, 2022 and accumulated a 9.1% stake for $2.6B by March 14. He definitely bought the dip!

Elon began hinting publicly at his interest in Twitter in a series of tweets starting March 24th when the stock price was sitting at $39.

On April 4 he announced publicly that he had acquired his 9.1% stake. The stock immediately shot up massively to $51/share. He posted to Twitter:

On April 5 he was invited to join the Board of Directors of Twitter which he initially accepted. However, it soon became clear that the terms of a board seat were overly constraining. He would be capped at 15% ownership, and could not say anything critical of the company.

On April 14 Elon made an offer to acquire Twitter for $43B, or $54.20/share and take the company private. This represented a considerable premium on the current stock price of $45, and an absolutely massive premium over the price before he signaled his interest, or the likely share price would have been once earnings were announced ($30? $20?).

The Board initially tried to block Elon. It appeared as though the blocking was on ideological grounds and just plain old board members and management wanting to keep their high-paying jobs. But eventually the board had to capitulate and endorse his offer.  If they did not, they might be personally liable for the investors they purport to represent losing out on $30/share.

Since then, Elon has brought in some other high net worth individuals friendly to the cause of free speech. The tender offer has not closed yet, and there may still be roadblocks, but we shall see.

Here are some more tweets from Elon, indicative of his plans for the company were he to acquire it. We'll let him speak for himself.

Here we see that Elon is not interested in letting the hateful crazies on either side run rampant:

 Here he speaks of his intent to focus on eliminating bots and on validating humans:

Here is Elon responding to and disagreeing with a prominent conservative voice over the need for anonymity in addition to authentication.

Here is Elon being critical of the opaque content moderation policies currently on Twitter.

Here is Elon tweeting the true meaning of free speech.

And a more extended take on his intentions regaring Twitter

Here he is seen being critical of Twitter's decision to massively ban (in an absolutely unprecedented way) the Hunter Biden laptop story weeks before the election and thus sway the results via media manipulation:

The left reacted a bit "over the top" in their criticisms, as they tend to LOVE the ability to ban opinions they disagree with:

Jack Dorsey and his head of content moderation went on the Joe Rogan podcast a while ago, and it really exposed the blindspot that Twitter has internally around remaining politically neutral. Here is Elon saying he saw that as well.

On a related note, here is Elon acknowledging the lack of balance now.

Here's a bit of an amusing distraction showing his sense of humour, and then an important point about privacy protection from prying government eyes.

 When accused of being a conservative, Elon tweeted this in response.

And then soon after:

I know lefties think that the right have gone further right. I don't know how that view is sustainable. Here is Ben Shapiro addressing that issue very well.

Here is Elon recognizing that there are powerful, powerful interests that wish to control citizen's access to information. Also a signal that he knows the nature of the fight he has taken on.

Pfizer making billions of dollars in profit off its vaccines and hiding the efficacy and adverse effect data (that's just coming out now). The miltiary-industrial complex funding billions of dollars to engage in a proxy war with Russia. Where is all the money going? Arms companies. Even Pope Francis agrees with me on that one:

Pope says NATO may have caused Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Francis says transatlantic military alliance was ‘barking’ at Russia’s door.

There's billions upon billions of dollars to be made by controlling the thoughts of the citizens in nefarious ways, and Elon does not like that.

So what do you guys think? Is Elon taking over Twitter a good thing?