![]() My sources at Twitter tell me that if Musk became CEO, you would see chaos and mass attrition. So presumably, he would go out and hire a bunch of new managers. ![]() He's said he doesn't have any confidence in management. ![]() So please illuminate us, would Elon buying Twitter make a difference in terms of the speech that's allowed on the platform?Ĭasey Newton: I mean, it's so hard to say, because it's not clear to me that Elon Musk has given thought to what will happen five minutes after the deal closes. But I think this, once again, shows that there is and continues to be serious confusion about what constitutes free speech in this country, here in the United States, and what constitutes free speech for a publicly traded social media company that happens to operate in the private sector and also has its own terms of service, so actually does still have rules around what people can and cannot say. There are some on the conservative side of the political aisle who believe that Twitter would basically become some kind of free-for-all where anyone could say anything. And they seem to believe that Elon Musk will give them the version of Twitter they want. But Musk has been no particular friend to Trump over the years, or vice versa, so it's not clear that's his sole mission, but because he has been such a blank canvas, conservatives in particular have really rallied around him. Of course, Twitter's most famous content moderation decision in the past couple of years is deplatforming Donald Trump. He has not really weighed in on many specific scenarios in content moderation that he thinks have gone awry. And so under his control, it would be more free-speech oriented. So what is the appeal? Why does he want to buy Twitter?Ĭasey Newton: Well, there is what he has said, which is a series of fairly skeletal pronouncements that boil down to there's not enough free speech on Twitter, and free speech is important for the survival of civilization. And so while I continue to believe that it's unlikely he will acquire it, there's a voice in the back of my head saying, Oh, well, this may mean that he actually is going to acquire it. Basically everything that I've thought about Elon Musk and Twitter has been wrong up until this point. So I need to ask you, is this for real? On a scale of 1 to 10-10 being absolutely yes-how likely is it that Elon will actually end up buying Twitter?Ĭasey Newton: Well, my joke about this is that all evidence points to the fact that he's not serious about it, which, by what I call the trickster god theory of Elon Musk, suggests that he is likely to buy it. ![]() Now, Casey, you've written both about Twitter and Elon Musk quite a bit in your excellent newsletter that everybody should subscribe to. Musk, who is the richest person in the world, by the way, put in a bid to buy Twitter for $43 billion with the intention of taking the company private. Last week, after acquiring 9 percent of Twitter's stock and stepping back from a company board seat, Elon suddenly announced that he wanted to buy the whole darn thing. And yes, that means we need to talk about Elon Musk. ![]() In the second half of the show, the three of us are going to talk about how we use Twitter, and we'll share some of our thoughts about the future of the social platform, but first, we have to grill Casey, because we want to talk about some of the disruption that's been happening at Twitter lately. Michael Calore: We could not think of a better person to bring on this week, because today we are talking about Twitter. Casey Newton: Thanks so much for having me, you all. ![]()
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