Twitter is free. You can go on there and type your embarrassing little thoughts for the whole world to see any time you like. Millions of us have been doing this for years. Revealing to everyone how dumb your inner thoughts are may cost you your reputation, sure, but it won’t cost you any money. Not even if you’re the richest man in the country.
So why spend $44bn to buy it? That’s a fair piece of change, even to someone whose net worth hovers above $200bn. It’s also much more than the company is actually worth, as evidenced by Elon Musk’s desperate attempt to get out of the deal almost as soon as he had gotten irretrievably into it. The price is too high to be a pure lifestyle purchase – if you want a media property just for the social cachet and party invitations, it can be had much cheaper. Fellow villainous mega-billionaire space tourist Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a mere $250m, less than 1% of what Musk just paid for a cacophonous global collection of weird, hollering self-promotion.
In truth, Musk probably bought Twitter for the same reason that sickeningly rich people throughout history have become press barons: to try to control the conversation. About themselves, in particular, and secondly about their own economic interests, and thirdly about their own inevitably selfish, bizarre, half-witted political beliefs. Once you have ascended the ladder of wealth past buying real estate and cars and boats and models and the other tawdry baubles that come with money, there comes a time when a hardworking plutocrat begins to be irked by the fact that, beyond their sphere of servants, people are still talking trash about them. It upsets their sense of omnipotence. After the thrill of bending the material world to their whim has worn off, the desire to bend the public conversation – and, by extension, the public mind – to their own liking takes root.
This has always been a hit-and-miss proposition. It’s easiest for those who are interested in straightforward political influence. From William Randolph Hearst to Rupert Murdoch, media moguls have a well-tested playbook for using sensationalism and propaganda and fearmongering to produce political outcomes. That’s the easy stuff. When the motives get mixed, though, things get dicey for the aspiring media moguls.
For those who don’t have Bezos-sized wallets, owning a news outlet can be a painfully expensive way to get party invitations. For those who don’t have Murdoch’s ruthlessness, it can be a frustratingly difficult way to change the minds of readers and viewers. And for those who lack perfect clarity about what they are doing, well, the possibility for hilarious disaster is very real.
Elon Musk is, ironically, the exact type of person for whom Twitter is poison. Wealthy, powerful and celebrated, he could have kept his mouth shut and let his work speak for itself; instead, he uses Twitter, and reveals to all of us that the richest man in the richest nation in the history of the world is an unfunny meme guy easily seduced by the same sorts of ideas that grab the minds of Reddit-scrolling 13-year-old boys. There is a lesson there about the inability of wealth to make someone interesting – but, setting that aside, there is a more relevant lesson about the danger of vast concentrations of wealth. Because when you mix the immature, half-baked, self-righteous grandiosity of a guy like Elon Musk with the ability to buy and sell multibillion-dollar global public corporations like toys, you have a recipe for chaotic, destructive stupidity on a staggering scale.
Many on the left suspect that Musk is in fact a Rupert Murdoch of the tech generation, planning to use Twitter’s algorithms to disperse and promote rightwing ideas. Others say this was all a way for him to diversify his finances and sell off a ton of Tesla shares without sparking investor panic. Those tidy explanations would be more satisfying than the likely truth: this guy saw a chance to put his sophomoric ideas about “free speech” into practice on his favorite app, and he did.
It is as if a half-bright fantasy football player bought your favorite NFL franchise and ran it right into the ground. (Except the implications of this – intertwined as they are with politics and media and Trumpism – are much worse.) Above all, we are in for an abject demonstration of why it is bad to have random businessmen running around your society with enough money to do absolutely anything they want. As kaleidoscopic as the factions of Twitter users are, this episode should be enough to make them all unite behind the idea of a wealth tax.
In a message to advertisers posted the day the sale closed, Musk wrote that “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner”. OK. Sure. Forty-four billion dollars seems like a lot to pay for the right to grandly reinstate @NaziAnime666’s right to post gifs about Pizzagate or whatever, but a fool and his money are soon parted and all that.
You may notice that Musk’s stated goal of being an angel of open, civilized discourse is not wholly compatible with all billionaires’ natural desire to bend the content of that discourse in a direction that they agree with. Reconciling these two competing mandates is one of the oldest and most central tasks of news media companies, or discourse-shaping social media companies, owned by rich guys. Many thoughtful journalists, pundits and professors have spent their careers wrestling with this tension – unfettered truth versus the blinkered logic of capitalism. Two hundred years into the history of American journalism, it’s still an open question how it will all be resolved.
But I do know one thing for sure: Elon Musk, zillionaire king of the nerds, alt-right meme lord, and committed union buster, is not the guy who’s gonna figure it out. If you are wondering what lies in store for all of us after his big purchase, just assume the dumbest possibilities will come true. An owner who is not cool or funny will do things that he thinks are cool or funny. Trouble will ensue. Tech and media are both inherently unstable industries, so the good news is that the possibility of Twitter spectacularly imploding does not make them that much different from everywhere else. Enjoy it while it lasts. Stay focused on eradicating billionaires forever. And, if you have the misfortune of working at Twitter, get yourself a union as soon as possible.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer at In These Times.