A surprise move that brings Elon Musk closer to owning Twitter than ever in their months-long legal saga, the billionaire has reversed course on his decision to abandon the deal.
Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter is back on the table and the billionaire is claiming the purchase will accelerate the development of his long-discussed “everything app.”
After months of litigation, the Tesla CEO is looking to avoid a court battle by offering to buy the social media platform for the price he originally agreed in April, valuing Twitter at $54.20 per share.
Musk followed up news of his renewed offer to buy the company with a tweet claiming the move would accelerate the creation of “X, the everything app.”
The billionaire responded to a comment suggesting it would be faster to build X from scratch saying: “Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong.”
Musk made the same claim during a Tesla annual shareholder meeting in August. He told shareholders he had a “grander vision for what I thought X Corporation could have been back in the day.”
Word through the grapevine is that Musk went back to the table because he’s almost certain to lose in court, which I also predicted.
America no longer has a justice system, only a legal system that’s been harnessed by the Death Cult to wage lawfare on its enemies.
So when the Cult’s narrative shifted from “That nazi Musk can’t be allowed to buy Twitter!” to “Force that nazi Musk to buy Twitter and pay a $1B judgment!” you knew the fix was in.
Regardless, the timing of Musk’s change of heart is interesting. Because another case is making its way to the Supreme Court which could decide the fate of all social media companies.
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to weigh in on whether tech companies should be allowed immunity over ‘problematic’ content posted by users.
The case at hand alleges that YouTube aided and abetted the killing of an American in coordinated 2015 terrorist attacks carried out by ISIS, which killed 130 people. The family of one of the victims, Nohemi Gonzalez, has argued that YouTube’s active role in recommending videos overcomes the liability shield for internet companies enacted by Congress in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act.
According to my layman’s understanding, informed by online sources with good legal sense and sound track records, SCOTUS has a good chance of ruling that social media companies that curate content – including suspending, banning, and demonetizing users for online speech – lose Section 230 immunity.
If that happens, I don’t see how Musk could maintain Twitter’s current censorship policies. He’d have to give users free rein, or else risk the platform getting sued into oblivion. It wouldn’t even require a real terrorist posting video of an actual attack. Some bluecheck could expose Twitter to liability by deep faking a phony incident.
So what is Uncle Elon thinking here?
He may have already given us a big clue with his references to the X app.
We know from published messages between Musk and ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that both of them pretty much wanted to destroy Twitter as we know it and replace it with an open source program.
Having Musk take over Twitter and letting Cultists destroy it through lawfare seems like a convenient way to achieve Musk and Dorsey’s plan with plausible deniability.
It may also explain the Cult’s abrupt heel turn on Musk’s Twitter buyout. Maybe their people inside the legal system tipped them off that the SCOTUS Section 230 case was coming, so they decided to hoist Musk with his own petard.
If so, Musk might be trying some jiu-jitsu on his enemies’ scheme. I just don’t see his multimillion-dollar legal team not warning him about the possibility of a setup. And even if his lawyers were oblivious to a hypothetical trap, you can bet it wouldn’t get past Jack Dorsey.
Time will tell, but it’ll be interesting to see if a Musk-led Twitter gets slapped with a crippling, Alex Jones style lawsuit, only to find that Musk has shielded himself in advance from personal liability.
Musk seems to think the world is better off with Twitter destroyed. So does Twitter’s creator. I’ve gone on the record agreeing with them.
Maybe this confluence of events is how we get there.
Either way, X Corp is a cool name. I dig products with X in their names.
Giant combat robots, for instance …
“If that happens, I don’t see how Musk could maintain Twitter’s current censorship policies. He’d have to give users free rein, or else risk the platform getting sued into oblivion.”
“We know from published messages between Musk and ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that both of them pretty much wanted to destroy Twitter as we know it and replace it with an open source program.”
In theory, couldn’t an open source social media program feature all of the benefits of social media curation without the downsides? If individual people (rather than a centralized company) could customize their own filters for which content they wanted to see, they would be able to prioritize the availability of content that is to their liking, and any censorship would be self-administered. This would theoretically enable content prioritization and curation without any single company, person, or group being responsible for anything that could bring punishment upon them in a post-Section 230 world.
“Some bluecheck could expose Twitter to liability by deep faking a phony incident.”
Speaking of this, Emad Mostaque (the founder of Stability AI, which created Stable Diffusion) has announced that an open-source deepfake detector is in the works. He fears the consequences of what could occur if deepfake detection was solely in the hands of corporations and governments (who could then essentially declare anything they wished real or fake with no one being able to challenge them), and is working to put the ability to detect what is real and fake in every person’s hands.
https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1572013393455845376
https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1572200622102806532
That’s a valid concern, and there’s little doubt it will happen.
It would be gratifying to watch Musk burn Twitter to the ground, but I’m not sure replacing it with “X, the everything app” is an improvement. If social media counterfeits human relationship instead if extending it on new scales, perhaps the best replacement for Twitter – and all the rest of it – is physical interaction, and the understanding that it is better to know a hundred people face to face, and some fraction of those 100 well, than to pretend we know a 1000, when all we see are each others’ public “dramatis personae.”
I’ve taken to putting social media away on Wednesdays and Fridays. Two things have become apparent. First, these platforms are addictive. Second, as means for staying connected with people, they’re superfluous. Anyone I really know, I should be able to call, email, text, or go find face to face. If I don’t know how to do any of that, I don’t really know that person anyway and the social media connection is a lie.