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Musk’s Twitter share purchase is why rich brats shouldn’t meddle with social media
One man-child’s plaything can’t be the world’s real-time information network and that’s why this will not end well
Leave it to Elon Musk — the richest man in the world right now and one of the most controversial figures ever to appear in the technology or media landscape — to cause a whole news and commentary cycle with a single move: the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX purchased, back on March 14th, almost $3 billion worth of Twitter stock. That was enough to buy him 9.2% of the service’s pool of shares, making him Twitter’s single biggest shareholder. The confirmation came yesterday, just 24 hours after Musk publicly asked on Twitter whether “a new platform for free speech” is needed. It’s safe to say that he had an answer in mind for that question more than three weeks ago.
Elon Musk’s relationship with Twitter is complicated, to say the least. On one hand, he uses it almost every day and has amassed a staggering amount of followers (around 80.5 million at the time of writing), comparable only to that of two ex-US Presidents and a handful of pop stars. On the other hand, the Tesla CEO often causes a lot of negativity when he’s using his considerable reach to do things like mock gender pronouns, promote…
