Elon Musk is buying Twitter to increase his wealth, mindshare, and influence. He does not actually care about free speech, and its naïve to think that he is buying the platform for "altruistic" reasons.
He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.
He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
He built huge amounts of wealth by building rocket ships and electric cars because he's worried about the earth becoming uninhabitable and thinks we need to be an interplanetary civilization. This is a dude who's dedicated his entire life to (in his mind) save all of humanity from certain doom.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.
Those goals are cool and all, but that doesnt change his poor worker treatment or his massive wealth hoarding, while still trying to change rules so he can have more.
Great goals, but in my opinion, a terrible ambassador for tech/engineering, and a completely ingenuine person. I do not believe he is buying Twitter to "restore free speech" at all, and I dont even think that itself is a particularly good goal without having laid out plans of what it means.
Him being in charge of companies that produce cool products does not make him a good person at all.
I haven’t worked for Musk, but I’ve heard he only hires fanatics who want to save the world. I expect that he expects things different from most employers.
>wealth hoarding
Most of his wealth isn’t in money or stocks, it’s in his companies. The money that is in stocks, well most of that’s in stock for companies that have actual assets and do actual things in the real world.
People always have power motives for doing things. But that doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people who have objectives that require power, or perhaps power seekers who need to meet objectives (or claim they do). I trust the former far more than the latter.
I believe he built huge amounts of wealth because he's something like "genetically predisposed to"; he's not different from other billionaires, who I think have something like a mental defect that encourages them to rack up their score as high as possible.
It's just that he has more interesting hobbies (Space, EV, whatever) than the rest of them; but for any move he makes, first ask -- does this look like part of a play to just gain more money? And 9 times out of 10 the answer is yes.
I buy a broken down camaro. The windshield is gone. The sheetmetal is rusted. The frame is bent. The motor needs rebuilt. I patch/replace the sheetmetal, and paint it. I straighten the frame. I rebuild the motor, and put a supercharger on it to boot. It’s a pretty nice little hot rod, and it was busted before. But you tell me, did I buy it or build it?
You buy an already functioning camaro factory that restores camaros, you do basically nothing in terms of hiring or management, you shitpost on twitter all day and hire an army of twitter bots to promote the amazing work you're doing on building that camaro.
But you tell me, did you buy that camaro, or did you build it?
Eh, I'm equally suspicious of everyone who speculates about "what Musk is doing". I think your post is spot-on about what he's NOT doing, but as to what he IS doing… how can you possibly know, what his true intentions are? I, for one, strongly suspect he's not even buying Twitter at all: he's just playing with the share prices to dump his 9% with a nice profit (as he always does). But I also guess he has a solid plan whichever way it goes. What actually IS his plan, if he's going to make Twitter private? I have like 10 versions of what it might be, and I don't expect that even one is close. But then, again, I don't really expect he is going to buy it anyway, so…
He could make his own platform, but the users matter. With users, there is influence. In old times, you used to buy the news paper company to get influence.
> He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
> I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
No absolutely not. Id even say that you wont find more than a handful of billionaires who havent built their wealth on exploitation.
Its such a massive amount of wealth to have, it is virtually always precluded by harming others. The only exceptions I can think of are company founders who got exceedingly lucky, and even then you could definitely stretch the definition of exploitation to include them too.
He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.
He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.