Everyone’s heard that Elon Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter and convert it into a privately held company. And if you asked me my opinion about this situation I’d have to say, “What the hell is Twitter and why should I care?” I looked up Twitter and what I learned is that it’s a social media website that allows any idiot to post a message up to a maximum of 288 characters long (but somehow this doesn’t count any enormously larger attached video clip).
But the proviso is that the poster has to be a brain-dead doofus. For non-doofuses your every utterance will be scrutinized by uber-leftist social justice warriors who will report any violations against Democrat party talking points to the commissars at Twitter’s Ministry of Truth where you will be suspended either temporarily or permanently and then cast into the outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
So, the supposedly smartest and richest man in the world wants to buy this company. Why? What will be accomplished if he owns this weird network? Will he somehow level the playing field? Will his employees allow this to happen? Will the government allow this to happen or will they instead administer a death by a thousand paper cuts? And is Twitter really of any value to the world? Does it have an impact?
I have to confess I’ve never really understood the allure of a 288-character snippet of information. That’s like forty, fifty words. So far, this post is about 250 words and I haven’t really finished the initial idea. If a tweet is really just a headline for an attached normal sized post, I guess that would make sense. Is it just that Twitter has such a large user base that it acts as a global bulletin board?
Okay, but if you were the richest man in the world and also supposedly one of the most technologically savvy individuals couldn’t you just build something better from the ground up? And you wouldn’t even have to do it alone. Peter Thiel is another tech billionaire who is interested in free speech concerns with the social media platforms. Couldn’t these two titans of industry capitalize on the demand of a public that is hungry for a level political playing field and build something much, much better than Twitter, YouTube or Facebook? After all, much less savvy people have begun to create alternates to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
Surely the financial and intellectual resources that an Elon Musk or a Peter Thiel can bring to bear on this kind of opportunity must be considerable. And if Musk is seriously considering buying Twitter, then he has identified it as a viable business opportunity. He doesn’t need to spend tens of billions of dollars to create an exciting and profitable business that already has a large population of people who would make up its user base. Probably one billion dollars would get the job done. And what’s one crummy billion dollars to Elon Musk?
I hold out the possibility that Musk is hoping that Twitter rejects his offer and that he plans to build his own platform. Maybe this whole bid is a publicity stunt to advertise his own entry into the social media business. I hope it is. Places like Gab and Truth don’t have the clout needed to compete with the established social media platforms. And, honestly, it’s not enough to just provide a similar product. Twitter and Facebook aren’t providing a satisfying product. They thrive merely because they currently enjoy a monopolistic stranglehold on the niches they created. What’s needed is something that provides a healthier environment for people on-line. A truly honest marketplace of ideas would be that healthier environment.
So, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and any other entrepreneurs out there who see an opportunity in Twitter’s partisan methods; don’t try to fix Twitter. Instead, bury it with a superior platform. And make obscene amounts of money doing it.