Twitter’s Biggest Problem Isn’t Elon Musk — It’s Advertising
Yes, Elon Musk is an arrogant, petulant billionaire who might just run twitter into the ground. Yes, there are serious concerns with how he’s treated employees at both Twitter and Tesla, and with many of his public comments. There are so many problems with Elon Musk that I could not possibly elaborate them here.
But Musk isn’t the only billionaire promoting and profiting from sensationalized misinformation, nor was twitter problem free prior to Musk’s buy-out. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Instagram), Jeff Bezos (Washington Post), Rupert Murdoch (Fox, New York Daily News, and the Wall Street Journal), Patrick Soon-Shlong(Los Angeles Times) are but a few other billionaires who promote their preferred worldviews by selling highly selective information that omits (some would wrongly say censors) many speakers and points of views, including those of journalists who do not appeal to the audience. I dare anyone who thinks otherwise to try to get an op-ed published in the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times.
And even if something rises from the ashes of the great TwitterMuskTake (either one of the many competing sites such as Post Social or Mastodon, or a post-Elon twitter 3.0), it will remain flawed if it continues to rely upon advertising as its primary business model.
