The Friday 10: Edition #7

Hopefully Elon Musk saves America from Twitter

Apr 08, 2022

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Elon Musk becomes Twitter's largest shareholder, joins board of directors; a certain side of our national political spectrum promptly spazzes out.

This development is a smile-inducing one, let me tell you. I'd be willing to bet Elon Musk is one of the last Twitter users they (Twitter's board, which until just recently resembled nothing so much as a cafeteria table filled with a possy of individuals who could each serve as an effective advocacy tool for abstinence) want anything to do with.

Regardless of what you think of him, the dude has some serious power, and not solely because he's on pace to become history’s first trillionaire. Musk has an ever-growing cult-like following comprised of all sorts of people the world over who’re fanatically devoted to him. There's a reason Tesla has never spent a penny on PR or advertising. Musk can send out the dumbest tweet ever and in less than a minute it'll have over 3,000 retweets. In this day and age, that's not “influence,” that’s power. I mean, he was TIME’S 2021 person of the year, and that's saying something considering how momentous those 12 months were.

I like Elon Musk. You’ve probably inferred as much. I don't drive a Tesla, I'm not a sustainable technology advocate/eco-friendly protester or anything like that; I like him because I continue to nourish a lifelong affinity for pretty much all underdogs. It might be perplexing, me using that descriptor — underdog — given my spiel supra about how powerful he is, but I do indeed see Elon Musk as an underdog. When you've dedicated your life to tackling impossible things for genuinely altruistic reasons despite legions of detractors literally betting against you (i.e. - Tesla was the most shorted stock ever… man, there’ve got to be some short sellers out there who’ve been thoroughly throttled over the past five years or so—Tesla is basically the Apple of cars at this point), you're an underdog in my book.

I'll stop waxing poetic about Musk though, maybe save my eulogy for a future post.

Anyways. There’ve been apoplectic tantrums aplenty since the Twitter news broke, and the hyperbole has been spectacular to behold, it really has, all of it painted with the same patina of narcissistic privilege that bespeaks the uniquely American ability to operate under the belief that even the most trivial of issues — and when I say “issues” I mean “such and such does not mesh with my personal worldview so I'm going to throw a fit” — are on par with the existential-level adversity folks in Ukraine are dealing with right now.

It should tell you something that the vast majority of Musk’s critics all share a similar… political predisposition, you might say. Elon is a staunch believer in free speech. I, too, am a first amendment absolutist. But Twitter, or rather, the morons who control the levers at Twitter, do not believe in the inviolability of the first amendment, which is why they’ve basically appointed themselves the world's arbiters of truth.

Musk simply got tired of the company exercising undue agency over the metaphorical agora. It's bad enough as it is that the media is grossly irresponsible when it comes to doing what they’re supposed to do, which is inform the populace — not editorialize, not curate, not spin, but inform — and make possible the continued longevity of the democratic-republic experiment that is the United States of America. So, Musk bought enough Twitter stock to make himself the company’s largest shareholder and secured a seat on the board. Hopefully he can make some changes for the better. Censorship is among the most slippery of slopes, nation.

“Cancel not, lest thee be cancelled.” — Proverbs 4:20