Musk, the curiously idle billionaire and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, stated that he had purchased a 9.2% interest in Twitter and would join its board of directors, but no, he’s not doing that; he wants the entire company. Musk revealed in a tweet that he made an offer to purchase Twitter’s remaining shares for $54 per share, perhaps confirming rumors that his goal — and it is a game for him — is to stage a hostile takeover of one of the world’s most popular social networks.
It’s unclear how Musk hopes to raise enough capital to carry out his great intentions at Twitter while also managing two enormous, ambitious tech firms, but the world’s richest man evidently didn’t have enough to do. Musk isn’t pleased with running two tech firms at the same time; he wants to run three. And it might be terrible news for a platform that was finally beginning to go in the right direction, as well as the people in charge of getting it there.
Twitter isn’t without flaws. It’s always been both – the horrible hell site and the one that provides us moments of transcendence every now and again. During Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Twitter has become a hotbed of disinformation as well as a critical aggregator of real-time open-source intelligence about the conflict. Jack Dorsey was both a self-serious aloof tech mystic and one who occasionally had moments of true moral clarity that echoed across the platform and its rules, much like he was in the company’s previous age.
Musk isn’t simply the polar opposite of the type of leadership that Twitter requires right now; he’s also a symbol of the platform at its worst. Musk is a petty, thin-skinned troll far too wealthy for all of this (truly, it would only take a million dollars to keep me from tweeting ever again — a small price to pay!).
He commands a formidable army of internet goons, regularly misleads the public about his heroic efforts to intervene in various global crises, sows mistrust in the media when the media is merely doing its job, slanders private citizens, And, we must underline, Musk should have more than enough on his plate to prevent him from making a big and completely needless power grab at his favorite spot to comb the internet for internet points with cannabis and breast jokes.
