LONG before he trolled and then acquired the microblogging platform, Twitter, Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and the world’s current biggest billionaire, had been a master troll. Those familiar with him would not be alarmed by his the idea of acquiring Coca Cola and “putting the cocaine back in.” Musk has a history of making controversial statements (he once claimed that Covid-19 was mere common cold and that he and his family were immune to it, then changed his view after contracting the virus) and doing controversial things, but he is almost always right on money matters.
Per the Bard of Avon, the South Africa-born billionaire of British-Canadian ancestry was born great, but then he has also actively sought to achieve greatness. He was born into money but has made much more. By age ten, Musk had actively developed an interest in computing and video games and by 12, he sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for around $500. He has, since college, mastered the art of selling, investing in bustling businesses and taking them over; founding companies where people thought there could be none; selling companies and shares, making controversial statements and becoming even bigger with sanctions.
The 51-year-old is founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; president of the Musk Foundation; and owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc, and has an estimated net worth of around $195 billion. Between November 4 and November 8, Musk sold 19.5 million shares, estimated to be worth nearly $4 billion, in Tesla, the electric vehicle maker, according to filings made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk, if history is any indication, would make phenomenal fortune selling ice to Eskimos.
But there’s a snag: Musk is currently engaged in a duel with Big Tech, the masters of the universe, over “free speech” and the universe of discourse. Until May this year when he dumped the Democratic Party as an Independent, saying that he could no longer support the “party of division and hate” and actively campaigned for the GOP—again as a troll—he was of no central/critical interest to Big Tech, the controllers of American politics and world opinion. But he has now stirred the hornet’s nest. The Hillary Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden voter turned 2022 GOP midterms advocate is no fire-breathing critic of liberal orthodoxy: his concern is the need to balance the power matrix, and this has pitched him against the mainstream media, including the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, etc, and of his co-players in Big Tech (Google, Meta, etc), all of which are traditionally in the liberal power bloc.
He had said in May: “I have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, historically – overwhelmingly. Like, I’m not sure, I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear. Now this election, I will.” And then he said of the just-held midterms: “To independent-minded voters: shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties. Therefore, I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.” That is not all. Musk not only wants to bring those previously banned from Twitter on board again, he has imposed a fee on verification, meaning that “free speech” will inevitably come at a cost.
In a recent piece, the Washington Post wrote: “Musk has also said that he would open the platform to voices that he contends have been suppressed on Twitter, and in particular those expressing conservative political and policy views. Musk isn’t wrong about this. Controversial ideas associated with right-leaning politics sometimes ran afoul of Twitter standards, or Twitter algorithms, in the past. But Musk’s ego and his bizarre instincts around speech are undermining whatever opportunity he has to live up to his vow to find new revenue through user payments.”
In saying that “controversial ideas associated with right-leaning politics sometimes ran afoul of Twitter standards, or Twitter algorithms,” the Post inadvertently put Republican charges against Twitter and indeed all of Big Tech in bold relief. In a free world, it is inconceivable that only conservatives (those with “right-leaning politics”) would have had controversial ideas and run afoul of Twitter’s rules, and complaints about Twitter’s algorithms being engineered deliberately against conservative voices are not new. They have been made by Twitter engineers and also by some life-long Democracts.
In the most notable instance of Big Tech and mainstream media bias and election interference, Twitter deliberately suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story because of its potentiality to damage the chances of the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, whose son hunter was allegedly involved in dirty deals built around the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Twitter flagged the story published by the New York Post, a conservative platform, as fake news and took it down from its platform. And all of the MSM followed suit. However, post-election, the story was confirmed to be true by all media in the United States, but it had been branded as fake news when it mattered most.
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice was preparing “a rollback of legal protections that online platforms have enjoyed for more than two decades, in an effort to make tech companies more responsible in how they police their content.” Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the Big Tech companies are guaranteed immunity from lawsuits arising from user-generated content, and from their censorship of user-generated content. Thus, unlike traditional publishers, the companies, including Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc, cannot be sued for defamation for statements made on their platforms, and for removing contents deemed objectionable. However, as the companies engaged in censorship of content and de-platformed many users, critics pushed for the removal of the legal protections.
Musk, now a Republican advocate, is thus bound to steer Twitter on a different path. The company had lost a fortune ($5 billion) and its shares had gone down by as much as 12 percent after it banned the then President Donald Trump, and Musk, just as keenly interested in conservative money as he is in liberal money, and knowing that a billionaire must put commerce before philosophy, has been stylishly courting Trump and his support base. He has repeatedly claimed that the decision to ban the former president was wrong, and one of his first steps as Twitter CEO was to fire the brains behind the ban, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety, Vijaya Gadde, who had spearheaded the push to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Musk would also have taken cognizance of the developments in Nigeria in June 2021, following Twitter’s deletion of a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari for threatening to deal with some citizens in the South-East like during the civil war. The government suspended Twitter’s operations in the country, saying Twitter was being used “for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.” Twitter was to remain in limbo for 222 days.
Musk is a master troll. In one picture, he depicted himself carrying a literal sink into Twitter’s headquarters with the caption: “Let that sink in.” Musk has cracked down on his impersonators on Twitter, including Kathy Griffin, insisting that parody accounts would be permanently suspended unless clearly specified as such. But critics see this as suppression of free speech. But Musk, self-described as a “free speech absolutist,” and a man who gives both Russia and Ukraine, and China and Taiwan equal right to say what they will, does not care in the least. He never leaves a doubt as to who is in charge.
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