Cant imagine Tim Cook doing that, but sure sounds like something Steve Jobs would do

Free speech, avocados… slight difference, wouldn’t you say?

Imagine Tim Cook were to take a loan on his Apple stock to take over Whole Foods because he doesn&#x27;t like their avocados.

How could you possibly know the personal limits of another person? How do you know he&#x27;s unfocused and undisciplined?

He is almost certainly responsible for Tesla not having filed for chapter 11 yet, but they have gotten close a few times. Every time they get close, he does something in the media that raises the stock price by 200% so they can quietly sell shares to cover the shortfall.I personally wouldn&#x27;t give him credit for the great engineering done at tesla. It seems like he is good at hiring decent people, and when he gets out of their way, great things happen. When he gets involved (like with the absurd touchscreen console, no-LIDAR self-driving, and the &quot;lights-off&quot; factory idea) it goes wrong. Musk is an amazing marketer and he deserves credit for that, but not for engineering work.

So are you admitting that Elon musk is solely responsible for Tesla’s success?Because whenever Tesla has a huge accomplishment, people always come out of the woodwork and claim Elon is Not the founder and all he does is take credit for everyone else’s work.

Kind of, yeah? A few years later I deleted my Amazon account because Amazon became the new AliExpress and I could usually find everything for cheaper on eBay.

Was The Washington Post the tipping point where Amazon started to collapse?I think we&#x27;re approaching a point in the lifespan of Tesla where is can stand on its own merit and no longer requires Musk to continue making a ridiculous amount of money. However, Musk is integral to the continued innovation and success, the same as Steve Jobs was to Apple. Under Tim Cook, Apple continued to thrive, albeit in a different way.Regardless, no way will Musk run Twitter on a day-to-day basis, he&#x27;ll remove the board, replace the CEO with someone he trusts, likely get Jack involved again, and a lot of developers will leave, leaving the company in a better position financially. Musk will likely just guide functionality and policy decisions from afar.

If you view it as a pure engineering problem, sure, but the problem with managing social media companies hasn&#x27;t been &quot;we can&#x27;t figure out how to store and display 280 character messages at high scale&quot; in a long, long time. How to properly moderate social media to control some of its worst tendencies has been a very visible and very difficult issue for pretty much every social media company for the past 10 years.

I doubt it because Twitter is so fundamentally simpler than companies like Tesla or SpaceX this won’t be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

in fact, the less Musk interferes with Tesla, the more successful it would be!

I doubt it. Tesla is so established at this point that it is successful regardless what Musk does in his free time.

Twitter is not &quot;irrelevant&quot; in any sense of the word. Also they have no direction from the current leadership as is.

He may have someone in mind who he will appoint CEO.Fundamentally, his beef with Twitter seems to be around their speech policies and maybe some missing site features. He doesn&#x27;t need to be even close to full time to resolve those. He just has to find a tech CEO who agrees with his values and who can execute when given a clear mission. There are plenty of those kicking around the Bay Area.

&gt; He&#x27;s basically the world&#x27;s first trillionaire.What?

&gt;He&#x27;s the richest person in the world, he&#x27;s so tremendously successful whatever attributes that you want to apply to him is literally only something to learn from. Hubris? Overconfidence? He&#x27;s basically the world&#x27;s first trillionaire. He has had how many doubters along the way and he&#x27;s right every time?Is it the goal ? To be the richest ? Amazing perspective for our world ahead, let people amass cash, it&#x27;s going to go _great_&gt;he&#x27;s right every timeExcept when he bets on camera only FSD, causes deaths, pushes the Hyperloop, does the Vegas Loop, calls people who reject him pedophiles, pushes Starship, pushes absolutely terrible working conditions for both factory workers and engineers, and an unending list of Elon bullshit. In the same way, is he &quot;right&quot; when Tesla only exists because of credits from the state (which he then complains about when the state asks him to respect the law), when SpaceX only exists because the US has kept it afloat, when he was kicked out of Paypal for being a dumbass, when he threatens our spacefaring possibilities with bullshit pride projects such as Starlink, when his stocks are propped up with his lies and just his personality ? Sure. Must be nice to live in the Musk Reality Distortion Field. Be real. He&#x27;s not a hero.

&gt; I couldn&#x27;t disagree more. He&#x27;s the richest person in the world, he&#x27;s so tremendously successful whatever attributes that you want to apply to him is literally only something to learn from. Hubris? Overconfidence? He&#x27;s basically the world&#x27;s first trillionaire.Am I right to say that Elon is not going to dinner with you?&gt; He has had how many doubters along the way and he&#x27;s right every time?So the robo-taxis have released on time as promised at the end of 2020 then as he suggested.

&gt; Elon is already rather uninvolved with tesla because of the fight with the SEC.I think this is hilarious.&quot;I can&#x27;t run my company because a lawyer is meant to review my tweets so that I don&#x27;t commit securities violations&quot;.&quot;I can&#x27;t be involved with my company because the SEC is investigating my brother and I for insider trading&quot;.This is horseshit. If this is the case, and I doubt it, it&#x27;s entirely because he is trying to martyr himself, not because of any actuality of the &quot;fight with the SEC&quot;. The SEC doesn&#x27;t give two shits about the efficiency of his production lines, his plans to open a new battery production facility, or whatever. Let&#x27;s stop the narrative that the evil bad SEC is stopping Musk from innovating to move humanity forward.

Elon is already rather uninvolved with tesla because of the fight with the SEC.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robyn_Denholm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robyn_Denholm</a>They also have over 100,000 employees. How much can Musk really be involved in?Tesla is pretty much on full self driving now, it&#x27;s basically blue chip and not going anywhere. Yes the trillion $ market cap is due in large part to him.&gt;Musk is already spread thin, now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined that he’s unable to stop himself from buying an irrelevant social media company as an expensive hobby. It’s the height of hubris.I couldn&#x27;t disagree more. He&#x27;s the richest person in the world, he&#x27;s so tremendously successful whatever attributes that you want to apply to him is literally only something to learn from. Hubris? Overconfidence? He&#x27;s basically the world&#x27;s first trillionaire. He has had how many doubters along the way and he&#x27;s right every time?I get why he&#x27;s buying twitter and it&#x27;s not about it being a hobby. Sure babylon bee was a catalyst but basically he sees the societal value of twitter. He sees the damage that twitter is doing through their political censorship. By fixing these problems it will provide tremendous value to twitter. He&#x27;s going to benefit greatly with the purchase.

&gt;&gt; People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring CompanyAnd both failed.

He uses one company to bail out another, in a major conflict of interest (see SolarCity and SpaceX&#x27;s use of NASA funding to buy junky bonds, then Tesla purchase with song and dance of fake solar shingles that couldn&#x27;t economically work as designed).

You mean, before Tesla? Like PayPal?Musk got rich off of PayPal. But lets be clear, he &quot;lead&quot; it for less than four months before being fired as the CEO for gross incompetence.

&gt; now he’s so unfocused and undisciplinedA guy who has managed to lead multiple startup companies to huge companies for literally decades threw multiple economic crisis. He is one of the longest running CEO in the auto industry.Its just amazing to me how people focus so much on &#x27;omg look at how he manages social media&#x27; compared to &#x27;simple looking at the actual record of the companies he leads&#x27;.People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring Company. And yet neither SpaceX nor Tesla have suffered.That said, I&#x27;m against it too. I just think that the idea that this will collapse Tesla is not realistic.

Pressure groups will whip up a tesla boycott on the basis that Elon&#x27;s not censoring things they don&#x27;t like.

I think “collapse” is a bit dramatic. We’re not talking about WeWork here.Revenue will continue to increase, but at a slowing rate.Stock price correction != company collapse.

I feel like we’re going to look back in a couple years and mark this as the beginning of the collapse of Tesla. Musk is already spread thin, now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined that he’s unable to stop himself from buying an irrelevant social media company as an expensive hobby. It’s the height of hubris.

The public&#x27;s memory is short, while spite&#x27;s memory is long.

He talks a lot about crypto scams as one of the reasons he is buying twitter, I&#x27;m willing to put money that he tasks someone or a group to develop &#x27;review&#x27; mechanisms for any account with the name &#x27;elon&#x27; or &#x27;musk&#x27;

Just because people are watching this and how newsworthy it would be, it won&#x27;t happen.

Just to play Devil&#x27;s Advocate, the account is only tracking the movement of Elon&#x27;s jet, not Elon himself. I don&#x27;t know if you can consider that &#x27;stalking&#x27; when, different to a private car, the movement of private planes is still somewhat public information.

&gt;If I were to make an account tracking a random person&#x27;s movement I&#x27;d likely be banned.He&#x27;s not tracking a person&#x27;s movement. He&#x27;s tracking a vehicle, via public information, traveling through public airspace.With opinions like these coming from the Elon army, Twitter is going to get worse.

It&#x27;s not extortion to respond to an offer from that person to accept a sum of money to take that information down. Nor is it extortion to negotiate on the sum.

He hasn’t been banned because despite your claims it is neither stalking nor extortion.

The owner of the account is a stalker attempting to extort his victim. Why hasn&#x27;t he been banned? If I were to make an account tracking a random person&#x27;s movement I&#x27;d likely be banned. Why should it be treated differently when the stalking victim is a celebrity?

&gt; If Musk fails to deliver on free speech, his persona will be on stake.His past actions show he isn&#x27;t a believer in free speech and that almost all his principles are transactional. An example of this transactional behavior is calling out Saudi Arabia for lack of free speech while owning twitter which is interesting because he didn&#x27;t have much problem with SA when they held 4.x percent of Tesla a few years back.His beliefs appear to be built on a sand, not rock.

&gt; If Musk fails to deliver on free speech, his persona will be on stake.Hardly; nothing Elon Musk does will turn his fanboys off, and everybody else already has a &quot;meh&quot; opinion of him. There is no risk for him.

He is worried about climate change and promotes bitcoin.He says Netflix is woke without any citations but just had two kids with Grimes.Elon is about making money and good at building support.I don’t mind him buying Twitter per se but I do believe it will distract from his noble pursuits. The former Reddit CEO’s thread nailed it.

&gt; If Musk fails to deliver on free speech, his persona will be on stakeHaha. He falsely accused british diver of being a pedophile on Twitter.Musk doesn&#x27;t care much about his persona.

That particular incident is under intense spotlight, so it will probably not happen and if it happens it will change the course of free speech discussions.I&#x27;m psyched either way. Instead of a faceless organisation with a CEO who can justify anything as his duty to the shareholders, now we will have a directly responsible figure. If Musk fails to deliver on free speech, his persona will be on stake.

Thats information that is publicly available anyway - it&#x27;s just that the presentation is nicer. ElonsJet can be replicated by anyone.

I think there is a difference between &quot;tracking somebody in your office&quot; and using public information in a more efficient way.

I don’t disagree but I also don’t think there’s less sympathetic example on the entire planet to use than Mark Zuckerberg. He’s quite literally made his fortune exploiting the privacy of the rest of us. I’m certainly not going to lose any sleep over his privacy being violated.

His right to privacy isn&#x27;t being violated by ElonsJet. The information being used is public knowledge.

&gt; Do you not have a right to privacy if you&#x27;re wealthy?No. You have a responsibility to be private, which can easily be neglected by underpaying the wrong people. C&#x27;est la vie!

Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you “have” to use your jet. You can charter another jet, fly first class, drive, any number of means of transit.In fact, once you have a jet you can strategically use it to deceive your movements.And maybe you can hire people to protect your garbage, I dunno.

That information is of public interest, because Musk is a public figure that constantly talks about climate change.

&gt; Do you not have a right to privacy if you&#x27;re wealthy?Interestingly, the courts have ruled that the ultra wealthy are &quot;public figures&quot; whether they act so or not, because of their &quot;undue&#x2F;oversized influence on public and social policy&quot;.

&gt; Do you not have a right to privacy if you&#x27;re wealthy?Honestly? Maybe not. He&#x27;s the richest person in the world, and as such he&#x27;s incredibly influential (and unelected). It&#x27;s absolutely in the public&#x27;s interest to know what he&#x27;s using all that money and influence on, in a way that isn&#x27;t relevant for your average median-earning Joe Schmoe. Once you get that rich you become more influential than a senator, and senators certainly don&#x27;t have a right to privacy for their constituents to not know what they&#x27;re up to.On the private jet front, airplanes don&#x27;t have privacy, necessarily so, because you need to know where they all are at all times to prevent collisions, protect airspaces, etc. So if you don&#x27;t want people to know where you&#x27;re traveling, don&#x27;t use an airplane that has a 1-to-1 correspondence to you.

&gt; Do you not have a right to privacy if you&#x27;re wealthy?Not if you are deliberately aim to be a person of public interest.Multi-Billionaires are persons of public interest by the power they wield given their wealth.So; you probably don&#x27;t have a right to privacy if you are as obscenely wealthy as Musk or Zuckerberg.

I think that after certain threshold of wealth you&#x27;re not quite human anymore and fair game. You definitely don&#x27;t have much in common with 99.999% of others, and have effectively infinite resources to bend reality to your will. So yeah, eat the rich and all that.

&gt;How about [unpopular politician]?Most of these people have public itineraries...

Blame the FAA. ADSB data is stupidly simple to receive with an RTLSDR and a raspberry pi, and there are community sites where you can upload. Point being: his plane can be tracked as long as it’s flying legally with its beacon on. This wouldn’t be a problem if the FAA just pushed back harder on the FOIA request for his jet data, then it would just be another anonymous private jet in the system instead of Elons Jet.FOIA wasn’t meant to make every record the government has public, it was meant to prevent the government from hiding things from the people. I can’t FOIA your social security number. I probably shouldn’t be able to FOIA the cell phone tracking data firehose that the FBI has, either. What I should be able to FOIA is the fact that the FBI has such a firehose.

I think the real harm @ElonsJet does to Elon Musk is not that his privacy is breached, if we learn where he&#x27;s taking a plane a couple of times a week that&#x27;s not exactly particularly intrusive[0]. It is that he is trying to position himself as the man who is directly tackling environmental issues by single-handedly bootstrapping an electric car company ... while frequently flying a private jet and having a carbon footprint thousands of times more than the average person.If you&#x27;re a public figure want to project a certain image of yourself, it hurts to be exposed as being the opposite of that.[0] - not least because the source of the data is his own plane broadcasting its position

As somewhat of an aside, I think ElonsJet should be allowed to exist but I also think its a terrible thing to do and harassment. Do you not have a right to privacy if you&#x27;re wealthy? Could I start tracking and broadcasting the whereabouts of someone in my office? How about [unpopular politician]? It&#x27;s weird that people celebrate this invasion of privacy. He&#x27;s still a human being.This was crystalized for me when I came across an article detailing what they found from dumpster diving through Mark Zuckerberg&#x27;s garbage. I mean, really?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;bill-murphy-jr&#x2F;a-professional-trash-picker-dug-through-trash-bins-outside-mark-zuckerbergs-house-found-13-surprising-things-heres-list-and-why-he-did-it.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;bill-murphy-jr&#x2F;a-professional-trash-pick...</a>

The Twitter board caved before that kid did

No, instead the person behind it will be doxxed.

The guy who made a bot to copy data from adsbexchange has almost half a million followers, and is a public figure.  I wonder if he would enjoy getting harassed in the same way or not.

I honestly don&#x27;t believe he thinks that deeply about it and doesn&#x27;t see any contradiction over what he says about free speech and how he acts. If it wasn&#x27;t for the negative PR it would receive, he wouldn&#x27;t think twice about booting the account. I don&#x27;t think he realises that everyone has their own line at which point someone&#x27;s &quot;free speech&quot; becomes unacceptable to them and that everyone has an idea on what the consequences should be for crossing that line. It&#x27;s just &quot;me and my pals are alright, we&#x27;re harmless and shouldn&#x27;t be cancelled but the guys I don&#x27;t like can take a hike&quot;

Also, why offer the original creator $50k to remove the bot?
If it gets removed, other developers will obviously create other ones - it&#x27;s a public API, after all.

It is easy to justify banning this kind of accounts. It is borderline stalking.Would you like it if there is a twitter account that tweets everywhere you visit?Elon can totally hire private investigators to follow the family members of a journalist just to prove that nobody would like this kind of accounts when they are the targets.

For all the Free Speech posturing Musk has put out around twitter, it will be very interesting to see if @ElonsJet account gets banned.

I agree. Elon Musk taking control of Twitter won&#x27;t spell the end of social media. Social media fills the intrinsic human need to be connected to others and recognized by others for a lot of people. Network effects make it very hard for a competitor to dislodge the incumbents, but as TikTok showed, it&#x27;s not impossible. Social media is here to stay indefinitely.

Hardly. What happened to #deletefacebook in 2018, #deleteinstagram? Nothing happened. Billions are still using it regardless of that.We also still have billions addicted to the new digital crack &#x2F; cocaine called TikTok. So this is far from &#x27;the end&#x27; of social media.In fact, it is the start of the increasing echo chambers and the ills of social media being used for disinformation campaigns.

It&#x27;s not , but now social media is mainstream media and can&#x27;t pretend to be cool anymore

Unlikely.  Twitter, despite of its influence, is a minor part of the social media business.  Instagram and TikTok are the biggest.

If I could go on Twitter and only see stuff from people I follow I&#x27;d feel the same as you about it. But they make it almost impossible not to be barraged with other stuff too, and not just ads, but hate and insanity that I tried hard not to follow. Those are the things that drove me away.Now I exfiltrate the good stuff with Nitter RSS feeds, and that way I get the experience you say you like about Twitter.

It depends who you follow. I only follow people I think are funny so now my Twitter feed is almost entirely toxicity-free. If you follow political accounts then you&#x27;re gonna get hit with the toxic firehose

Is this anything different from Facebook or Google?

I don’t see how it ever would be. But that said, I remember the era of the Arab Spring where everyone said social media would liberate us all… of course it never turned out to by true but I feel as though Twitter is still pretending that it will.Being bought by Musk ought to bring about an end to any such perception. It’s going to be a rich man’s plaything (nothing new there, billionaires used to buy newspapers instead!) and who knows if it’ll be a success or not, but it has no higher calling and we’re probably all better off for recognising it.

What stops you from deleting your twitter, regardless of whether Musk buys it?

It surely is, the lunatic has purchased the asylum.

I don&#x27;t consider Linkedin a social network at all any more. It&#x27;s just a spam&#x2F;announcement&#x2F;congratulations feed for me.Twitter underwent a change over the last ~4 years where it went from having its own, weird &quot;extremely online&quot; culture to being a battleground. You really can&#x27;t avoid the mess unless you put in an extreme amount of effort.

&gt; I&#x27;ve been on twitter since the very beginning and lately it feels like it&#x27;s a toxic cesspool on all sides.&gt; I say this as a twitter addict and prolific poster over more than a decade.It&#x27;s possible Twitter(and Social media in general) is as not as toxic you feel. I spend more time on LinkedIn than other sites and I feel it&#x27;s more toxic than others. SM sites do feel less toxic if you tune up your feed, mute people and spend a little less time on them.

Cesspools can find you (or the people you follow) even if you don’t want them to.

Twitter is what you make it. If you choose to surround yourself in the toxic cesspool parts, perhaps that says more about you than Twitter?99% of the stuff I see is interesting technical content

I was one of the first users, still have a 3 digit API ID, and made some good money from Twitter over the years. The often cited cesspool is highly exaggerated among certain peer groups. Twitter can be fun and happy and hasn&#x27;t really changed a lot, provided that you follow the right people — Which can be hard for new users given the non-explorative&#x2F;gradual onboarding. Back in the days, we built proprietary blocking into the app — all those things, filtering, etc. are now available natively. Twitter only gets frustrating if you let it.

This is my hope as well. The belief that everyone should be on the same social network is misguided, naive, and renders us too prone to manipulation and misinformation. I look forward to social networks splintering and their cultural influence beginning to wane.Hoping they end up as footnote in history textbooks of a weird time when people worried about checkmarks and follower counts, and it all amounted to nothing.

If you don’t see the toxic, you probably are the toxic

I never had anything toxic on my twitter feed and I spend a lot of time on it. The quality of your feed depend on who you follow.

Twitter is a big place.  I follow a lot of reporters, policy analysts, space entrepreneur, etc and don&#x27;t get much toxicity.  There are some people whose long form writing I really enjoy but who are just too negative on Twitter for me to follow them there, I just hope that other people will retweet their good stuff.

Also a former usenetter. And former FidoNETter.

&gt; I&#x27;ve been on twitter since the very beginning and lately it feels like it&#x27;s a toxic cesspool on all sides.Now you know how the old school Useneters feel. Welcome to Eternal September.

Lol what? We&#x27;re social animals. You realize that forums were also social media? Just because the term didn&#x27;t exist 20 years ago doesn&#x27;t mean it wasn&#x27;t a thing.

Part of me hopes this is the end of the social media age. I&#x27;ve been on twitter since the very beginning and lately it feels like it&#x27;s a toxic cesspool on all sides.I say this as a twitter addict and prolific poster over more than a decade.

Here&#x27;s a different perspective:
With Jack leaving 6 months ago, the company finally had a chance to thrive.

Twitter was dying anyway and it needed to be saved from itself. With Jack leaving, earnings around the corner and with this final offer. It was exactly what they needed as if they rejected this only offer, it will certainly crash the stock anyway with little room to recover.As much as the rats don&#x27;t know where to jump for alternatives perhaps it&#x27;s better to just sit on the sinking boat to see how far it goes before it has completely sunk or whatever refloats their boat.

I&#x27;ve was at a company that had an absentee CEO. One who would swoop in every few months and make strong declarations about direction, product, and so on; but was otherwise never there. It was a nightmare. We suffered constantly from his eccentrics, it constantly hurt our product, and destroyed morale and the ability to feel like you had no power over your work.

which means the employees aren&#x27;t monitored closely by upper management then? I don&#x27;t see why it&#x27;s &quot;bad&quot;.The only thing i can think of being bad is micromanagement, and inadequate compensation. I dont know how twitter compensates their employees, but i&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s not inadequate.

I think you are underestimating the legendary level of importance that Gwynne Shotwell has on SpaceX success.

If he can could manage SpaceX and Tesla around 2017 when shit was going down, this isn&#x27;t that crazy.

But what kind of CEO will he hire? One that broadly shares his views, and will not push back in the slightest when he (inevitably) interferes from his board seat. What he&#x27;ll really hire is a COO, regardless of the actual title.

I&#x27;m imagining an NFL owner situation. Most owners were already wealthy from other businesses when they bought a team. They always hire executives to run the business. But they also spend an inordinate amount of time sticking their nose into team business because it&#x27;s fun and exciting and glamorous. Musk isn&#x27;t doing this because it&#x27;s fiscally sensible. He&#x27;s doing it because he wants to own a popular social network and exploit it for his own ego. He will name a CEO but he will keep them on a short leash and assert his own ideas whenever he has them.

He already spends hours a week just posting on Twitter (and reading it, liking posts, etc.)I think he&#x27;s obsessed with his growing celebrity and Twitter is his megaphone.

Musk for sure will hire a CEO, I can&#x27;t imagine that he will spend more than a few hours a week a month on Twitter (once the deal has closed and he hired a new management).

Having an aloof CEO not running the company absolutely is bad. Case in point: Twitter.

Obligatory reminder that SpaceX has its own CEO, think the other companies do too. Think Musk actually staffs the orgs pretty well other than Tesla the other companies seem like they’d do fine without him, but him pushing seems to help.

Should they feel bad for creating value for Saudi royalty?

I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if he gave himself the CEO title, but actually had a president take on almost all normal CEO duties. Eg, as far as I can tell with SpaceX from interviews and such, Gwynne Shotwell really runs SpaceX. Elon jumps between whatever he thinks needs his attention most at the moment, rooting out problems.As for what he&#x27;ll do with Twitter.... I don&#x27;t think anyone really knows how it will turn out. He&#x27;s proven to be pretty self obsessed (canceling critic&#x27;s Tesla orders), so maybe he&#x27;ll use his power to knock down stuff he personally doesn&#x27;t like (his private jet tracker). Or maybe his talk about free speech is real and he has good ideas on how to actually make social media a benefit to society. I think in his companies&#x27; software has been his weakest area (still thinking cameras are enough to do full self driving, which I think out of any project has most failed to materialize his promises?), so maybe he won&#x27;t understand how to mold a fully software based company. However, maybe he&#x27;ll just want Twitter to work the way he thinks Twitter should work as a user, knock down a bunch of unnecessary BS (eg the insistent push towards algorithm timeline) and force his hand on features people really want (eg, the ability to edit Tweets.)

An owner is not a always the CEO. If anything he will make sure that the CEO that will actually focus on twitter.Also, If they didn&#x27;t feel bad about creating value for Saudi royalty shareholders they probably won&#x27;t feel bad about doing random stuff for the lulz

I&#x27;m sure many of them are excited to get a chance to work for him.

Those employees that have stock options are about to get rich.

I feel for the employees of Twitter. Years with a part time CEO whose time was dedicated elsewhere… now they’ll have a new part time owner whose time will be dedicated elsewhere and has a propensity to do weird things for the online lulz.

I&#x27;d argue it started with the PC revolution and the lionization of CEOS in the 80s

We&#x27;ve been there since the late 90s.

The fastest age of economic and technology growth of any country in the history of the world?

Speaking of Trump, what are the chances he&#x27;ll get un-banned?

It’s interesting to me because someone like Trump gets frustrated with Twitter, and the best he can do is raise capital for a social network which seems doomed to fail. Musk can just buy twitter. Trump was the president and one of the most influential political figures in the world, but in this regard Musk dwarfs him in terms of power.

The poison pill prevents Musk from taking over by simply buying 51% of stock, and allows him to proceed only by giving the board an offer they agree to, in which case they&#x27;ll remove the poison pill.

It activates when someone gets 15%...but musk will acquire the entire company at once effectively bypassing it.

Fun to own, terrible to operate, even harder to sell.

It&#x27;s already private , sadly no chance of drama

Hacker News is already a good place to speak freely.

I consider &quot;buy twitter&quot; to be musk&#x27;s retirement plan B.Ideally, he&#x27;ll move to mars and take twitter with him.

&gt; this will allow him to make even more funny posts on the internetHow so? I hadn&#x27;t heard of Twitter, or any media (social or not), preventing him doing exactly that already? Quite the opposite.

This is perhaps true at a cursory glance, but this will allow him to make even more funny posts on the internet, arguably a more important goal than decarbonization or martian habitation.

Who becomes a follower of someone they don&#x27;t think is cool? People who follow ironically?

Anecdotally I definitely know people who are into Musk purely because of the SpaceX&#x2F;Mars colonization stuff.

That literally the exact opposite of people I know.Pretty much everybody I know loves SpaceX and the technology and doesn&#x27;t give a shit about US politics or the SEC or whatever other crap people in the US get worked up about.

Do you know people who work or have worked for him? I work in the clean tech industry and know several people who work(ed) for solar city or Tesla. Musk is, I hear, a great recruiter, but then overworks his talent and eventually they burn out.

There is a sizeable contingent who are into him because they are terribly ignorant of the history of our efforts in space and the relationship between NASA and SpaceX, and think he has stuck it to the crusty old government man and &quot;disrupted&quot; the entire endeavor.

I&#x27;m very reluctant to call myself &quot;a Musk fan&quot; (and I&#x27;ve never met anyone like you describe, though no doubt they&#x27;re out there somewhere), but I have to admit that the things he&#x27;s done are remarkable: building several large companies which are not only commercially successful but advance the public interest with much more ambition than any other companies I&#x27;ve seen in my lifetime. Previously, accomplishments like those of SpaceX were only feasible in a Cold War context. I also think he has good political instincts (pushing back against regressive leftism without indulging in unsavory elements of the right), and I can even appreciate the occasional shitpost; however, I think he often goes too far and veers into immaturity. But expecting someone to accomplish what he has while also having perfect social grace is unrealistic; if his critics really want to put him in his place, they should do so by example--do something to significantly advance the public interest without social foibles.

&gt; The cult of personality is more important than the actual outputThere is a quite interesting inverse effect too, though. Musk&#x27;s actual output is undeniably pretty impressive (I challenge you to watch a rocket land on a drone ship and tell me otherwise!), yet there is a veritable army of people online waiting to suggest in the comments on stories like this that he&#x27;s just all about memes and personality. Maybe two opposing reality distortion fields with Musk suspended somewhere in the middle?

It&#x27;s just crazy that people fawn over him this much. He&#x27;s the richest guy on earth, he doesn&#x27;t stick it to the man, he is the man.Good luck to twitter I guess.

Exactly zero of the people I know who are into Musk are into him because of these reasons. Granted, this is a very very very tiny corner of Musk&#x27;s fans but the people I know are into him because he is &quot;badass&quot; and &quot;sticks it to the man&quot; and things like this.I think that Musk has an evolved version of Jobs&#x27; reality distortion field. The cult of personality is more important than the actual output and he is definitionally &quot;cool&quot; to his followers.

&gt; Many many people on twitter would happily pay for itmaybe that&#x27;s the key. $15&#x2F;month subscription to post, free to read.

snapchat has more monthly active users than twitter does. tiktok is over 2x as big as twitter, soon to be 3x. if an intelligent person wanted to own the public square, they would buy tiktok

Twitter really is the broadcasting social network for the intellectual elite, so in that way its an extremely important piece of society, however toxic it is right now. Because of that I absolutely agree that it&#x27;s undervalued and under-utilised for what it&#x27;s become.Many many people on twitter would happily pay for it. It&#x27;s not like Facebook where you have to rely on ads because 90% of users would never pay, and the ones who would you don&#x27;t want to charge bcause you make $200+ per year off them.I think Elon understand both these things because of the way he says it&#x27;s become the defacto public square. It really has for thought leaders. But thought leaders are a completely different market to most social networks.

What&#x27;s the alternative though? 0 moderation is what we had with email, and that was called spam.The only &quot;legitimate&quot; alternative is the legal process and that&#x27;s too slow.Personally, my lack of imagination makes me say we don&#x27;t have an alternative right now.

Are you saying that we cannot properly address climate change because of... checks notes
Twitter&#x27;s moderation policies?

Please explain how social media moderation is keeping us using fossil fuels.I would argue the opposite: moderation reduces paid corporate shills (when done correctly).

Indeed. The window of opinion that is allowed on twitter is anti space exploration and frankly anti-human. Elon needs a way to sway public opinion to allow mars settlement. Twitter might be that.Currently, SpaceX is blocked from doing the first starship orbital test. Not for technical reasons, but for frankly totally bullshit bureaucratic reasons. A free speech twitter might be the right way to fight back against this government overreach.

This may seem like a wild take, but perhaps it&#x27;s worth entertaining that social media moderation as it exists today could be a significant impediment to the realization of those goals.

I wouldn’t be surprised if half of his wealth was due to his online presence. This move makes absolute sense.

In instances where Musk has power to make speech more open and free when has he done so?

You mean the Elon Musk who just publicly body shamed someone because that person did something he didn’t like? Get ready for a wild ride where Twitter gets even worse, giving a megaphone to everyone like himself who wants attention.

He will change it to let all the toxic people back on.  It will become worse and less pleasant and he will likely lose investors money ultimately but maybe not before he exits. We shall see.

Musk is not the right person for this job. He simply lacks the skill set for it. Running a large social media platform requires nuance and tradeoffs.

A necessary one. The ideologues among the Tw leadership were doing a lot of harm to Western society (and therefore more generally to democracy and the rule of law). I hope Musk will be able to fix it now.

Regardless of what you think of Trump, it is absurd that a major medium of public communication has banned a former president. I&#x27;ll concede that a big part of the absurdity is the fact that Trump was president, but the idea that people need protecting from someone&#x27;s words, and that Twitter&#x27;s leadership are the appropriate people to make that call, really doesn&#x27;t sit right with me.

&gt; I don&#x27;t think that would have happened without Tesla.why? what would the other car manufacturers do when there is no more oil to put into the combustion engines? just lie down and die? everybody can see the writing on the wall. sure, tesla might have sped it up a bit. but to be solely responsible for that? tesla is not even the first EV company or the first prototype.

This is kinda how I feel about Elon.As a person, I really don&#x27;t care about his personal opinion on most things. I really don&#x27;t want him in charge of Twitter especially since I can see the first thing he does is unban Trump. So I am hoping if this does go through an alternative quickly springs up and gains dominance.But when it comes to Space... I am a strong believer in SpaceX. The facts with how they are performing. Especially after how bad the SLS is going. We basically needed SpaceX.Tesla? I mean I am glad he did it when he did it. Thankfully we are now seeing most (if not all?) car companies working on electric and I don&#x27;t think that would have happened without Tesla.

&gt; as they fail to deliver.What are you referring to? Even his lamest company (TBC) has delivered some stuff. When it comes to reducing fossil fuel use Tesla has achieved more than the USA Green Party, and with regard to expanding space access SpaceX is beating most national space agencies combined.

Convincing people he’s actually interested in those goals (moving humanity of fossil fuels and earth) is going to get harder and harder to do.  Buying twitter might be a good way for Musk to continue to shape the narrative around his businesses as they fail to deliver.

This is what I&#x27;m worried about. Owning&#x2F;running Twitter sounds like a huge distraction from SpaceX, which is the most important way he can make an impact in my view. His involvement in Twitter up until now has consisted of relentless culture war shit posting that hasn&#x27;t added any real value to society, and I hate to see him going farther down that road.

His actions say otherwise. Delusion and narcissism are real things.

I think this is already pretty clear from his work.  Nobody builds Tesla or SpaceX to get famous or rich - there are much easier ways.  He is truly a nerd&#x27;s nerd.

Thanks for the &quot;I drank the kool-aid&quot; perspective.

nothing says &quot;genuinely wants to make a difference to humanity&quot; like buying the #16th ranked social network on a lark

I haven&#x27;t met Elon, so I dunno if I buy your view. But I do thank you for articulating it so clearly.we&#x27;ve got this cultural veil of cynical nihilism that keeps us from thinking people could think like that. You&#x27;re suggesting that someone is a good person? OMG no way. and he&#x27;s some rich arsehole? can&#x27;t beTerry Pratchett called it &quot;crab bucket&quot; thinking.It may be worth the risk of buying into some Musk hagiography just to have a break from the common popular despair.

Having met Elon, I can tell you that he is not into anything for the fame, fortune, or glory. Those are secondary.He genuinely wants to make a difference to humanity.A lot of us who agree with him, do so in alignment, because as individuals we also want to make a difference to humanity, and .. in so doing: we see the problem with the commons.If we do not fix the commons, it will be weaponised against us all, and that is in fact the situation.So, from a fanboix perspective, in all honesty, this seems like Elon has added a 3rd option to his list: iii) stop humans from killing each other in the meantime.

I hate Tesla, it is the Apple of Car Companies, and I hate Apple. Their draconian business practices, anti-repair stance, and several other things keep me from buying a Tesla the same way i will never own an Apple Product.SpaceX is cool...Gotta love any company that has a banded Flame Thrower --- the Borning Company....All of that said, I follow Musk because he He does what he wants, public perception be damned, Media be damned....I am tried of Political Correctness, anyone that stands in the face of that has my support, even if I disagree with them politically as I often do with Musk.

He just wants the user base. Intends to build a protocol to enable free speech.

Huge amount of that production gets spent on keeping the world running - income vs disposable income.

For context, Musk&#x27;s net worth is the same amount of value that the world produces every 32 hours. So him directing all his wealth towards those goals would be a huge redirection of resources, but not necessarily significant on a global scale.

personally, i wish he would log out and focus on starship. Let me touch the third rail real fast, i felt the same way about Trump. Just logout of twitter and focus on the country.I&#x27;ve said it before but Twitter is like a cancer, it begins to grow in some poor unfortunate souls irrespective of wealth, knowledge, or privilege, and slowly overtakes their whole being.

This couldn&#x27;t be further from the truth.People invest with Elon because he has, objectively, an extraordinary track record of success.<pre><code> - SpaceX&#x27;s market capitalization has surpassed $100 billion [1].
 - Tesla&#x27;s market cap has topped $1 trillion, eclipsing the combined value of all other automakers [2].
 - Elon&#x27;s latest venture, The Boring Company, is currently valued at $5.7 billion [3].
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;elon-musks-spacex-valuation-100-billion.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;elon-musks-spacex-valuation-...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;tsla&#x2F;key-statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;tsla&#x2F;key-statistics&#x2F;</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;elon-musks-boring-company-hits-5point7-billion-valuation.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;elon-musks-boring-company-hi...</a>

I feel that most people have invested in Elon because he knows how to make a lot of money and they want to be part of it.Investors are here for the money. While some will favor some companies over others for ethical reasons, no one invests to lose money. In the case of, for example, Tesla, the reasoning is usually that governments all around the world want to move away from fossil fuels and because Tesla is in that market, it will eventually make shittons of money.That Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter shouldn&#x27;t have an impact on the potential profits Tesla can make, Elon or not, Tesla will continue making electric cars in a world that demands electric cars to move away from fossil fuels. As for SpaceX (the &quot;interplanetary&quot; side), it is private, so you can&#x27;t invest.

I feel like people have invested in Elon in large part because of his alignment with i) moving humanity away from fossil fuels and ii) making life multi planetary. He is obviously free to do as he pleases with this new wealth but I cant help but feel this as a huge redirection of resources (in terms of both capital and focus) from those goals

it really doesn&#x27;t require such extreme examples. The EU will also ask for all kinds of censorship. Germany just made wearing the &#x27;Z&#x27; illegal, meaning that any kind of pro-russian viewpoint will have to be censored.
There is only one country on earth that has decent free speech and it&#x27;s the US

He&#x27;ll do both. Free speech in countries that have laws that allow&#x2F;support it.But the thing everyone forgets is that he has very strong ties to the US government. From a free speech perspective, this is as good as the government taking over twitter, but much better PR

&gt;&gt; He&#x27;s already said that he&#x27;d follow all local lawsIs Twitter available in on of the following countries? China, Saudi-Arabia, Russia, Turkey? Since we know the answer I&#x27;m looking forward to see how helping those local governments go after &quot;dissidents&quot; will be aligned with Musk&#x27;s high ideals of free speech.

Tone policing good. I unironically believe this, especially if tone policing allows actual discussion, rather than shouting matches.

I think he already explained the mindset here by differentiating between moderating speech, and moderating behavior. So people who say certain things might still be banned or violate guidelines because of how they say it, but the event would probably be misrepresented as infringing on the right to free speech.

This sort of thinking is how wars and genocides get started. Being decisive and following through on execution is an important skill, but ignoring other stakeholders’ opinions has downsides that are best not ignored.

What does &quot;the other side&quot; look like in this case?

&gt; Musk has admitted he doesn&#x27;t understand people, is a self-confessed troll &amp; edgelord and and Tesla&#x27;s culture seems less than ideal. So lacks any of the qualifications I see as being needed to run something like Twitter.That&#x27;s why he&#x27;s perfect for this task. Most decision-makers feel intense scrutiny and tip toe around things that cause backlash, especially things that threaten the status quo.When you&#x27;re oblivious to how people will react to your vision, you&#x27;re more able to follow through and make it to the other side.

Speaking of the SEC [0]:&gt; In 2018, he came under fire after tweeting that he was considering taking Tesla private, and the SEC charged him with fraud. Musk agreed to a court-approved deal in order to settle the charges, which required that Tesla lawyers review any social media posts containing information &quot;material&quot; to shareholders. Months later, after he was called out for defying the order, the settlement was amended to include a specific list of topics Musk needs permission to tweet about. The list includes tweets about the company&#x27;s financial condition, production numbers or new business lines.&gt; The SEC notified Tesla that two of Musk&#x27;s tweets from 2019 and 2020 — one about Tesla&#x27;s solar roof production volumes and one about the company&#x27;s stock price — hadn&#x27;t received the required pre-approval, the Journal&#x27;s Dave Michaels and Rebecca Elliott reported.I find it hard to overlook that at least one thing that might be motivating him to buy Twitter is to tweet however he wants to tweet, regardless of US law.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;01&#x2F;tech&#x2F;elon-musk-tesla-sec-tweets&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;01&#x2F;tech&#x2F;elon-musk-tesla-sec-twee...</a>

&gt; He&#x27;s already said that he&#x27;d follow all local lawsI&#x27;m all for a good damning with faint praise, and this definitely put a smile on my face.I&#x27;m still convinced this is just the Twitter board calling Musk&#x27;s bluff.Lets say this does fall through, the SEC, Tesla, and SpaceX fall out could be REALLY bad.

&gt; find the elusive path of maintaining free speech, following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your &quot;side&quot;.Verified, real people will change the dynamic.&gt; Admitted he doesn&#x27;t understand people, is a self-confessed troll &amp; edgelord and and Tesla&#x27;s culture seems less than ideal.He got all those self-confessed trolls &amp; edgelords together, created companies in hard sciences and made everyone rich in the process. I worked at Tesla, it was a good time.

&gt; utterly insane how people here jump to the defense of billionaires.The discussion forums hosted by a startup accelerator are friendly to major capitalists? Who would have expected it?

I don&#x27;t see the relevance.Whatever laws protect that data or communications will continue to exist. And if you&#x27;re just taking it on good faith that the current ownership won&#x27;t do anything shady even if there&#x27;s no laws preventing it, that&#x27;s a much bigger problem to address.

There isn&#x27;t any particularly good reason to trust the old management over the new management. It&#x27;s always been unaccountable billionaires.

No one is forcing those entities to use Twitter. They can post on their own website that they control if they so wish.

I mean, if we aren&#x27;t okay with this dataset existing under new ownership, why were we okay with it existing under the previous ownership?If this dataset is dangerous, regulation is the way to solve that, not relying on the benevolence of corporate boards and shareholders.

&gt; Taking a moment to think about how utterly crazy it is that in 2022 a company with a significant dataset of private and public communications, that has municipalities, companies and governments on the platform, can switch ownership with pretty much zero scrutinyWhat you&#x27;re saying is why do regulations allow for this? Idk, but this is a regulatory question, and therefore it should be directed at the government not at the billionaire in question.

I&#x27;m also utterly gobsmacked how people here think &quot;jump to the defense of billionaires&quot; is in any way a substantive counter-argument.

&gt; billionairesCall them Oligarchs like we have been taught to do for their commie counterparts.

Billionaires are the celebrities and royalty for tech folks. Human beings thrive on hierarchy and we need to have people above us and below us in order to know where we stand in society.Often people look up the ladder in awe and respect because we all want to move up and be there ourselves one day, so it makes sense to venerate that position in order to justify it within ourselves subconsciously.

&gt; interesting to see if he can find the elusive path of maintaining free speechI am also utterly gobsmacked how people here jump to the defense of billionaires.&gt; Taking a moment to think about how utterly crazy it is that in 2022 a company with a significant dataset of private and public communications, that has municipalities, companies and governments on the platform, can switch ownership with pretty much zero scrutiny -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;emilybell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1518580094649966592" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;emilybell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1518580094649966592</a>

&gt; Welcome to Voat 2.0.Or Reddit 1.0? That&#x27;s what reddit used to be, and reddit got quite popular when it was like that.

&gt;&gt; Trolls, disinformation spreaders, and &quot;free reach absolutists&quot; are going to be thrilled with the megaphone Musk will provide them to drown out their enemies.Just remember, twitter does not give those people a megaphone. It&#x27;s the media that report on their stupid shit that gives them an audience. Otherwise nobody would know what they&#x27;re saying - especially the people who don&#x27;t like them - and yet everyone knows who some of those people are.

I think many people have made assumptions about what Musk means when he talks about free speech. I don’t think (and greatly hope) it’s going to be  an uncensored free for all, which typically leads to a toxic nightmare. Fingers crossed!

Twitter is full of trolls, disinformation and calls to violence against people at this very moment.

Trolls, disinformation spreaders, and &quot;free reach absolutists&quot; are going to be thrilled with the megaphone Musk will provide them to drown out their enemies.Welcome to Voat 2.0.

He is basically Thiel with even more &quot;fuck you&quot; money, and now he owns a huge megaphone that approaches the size of his ego.

Let&#x27;s be absolutely clear, Musk does not care about your free speech. He has a history of shutting down speech he doesn&#x27;t like and will continue to do so.

&gt; defining a healthy culture for your elusive market place of ideasAfter taking part in the &quot;DevOps&quot; cultural revolution, I feel that there is no path to mandating culture. Culture is the summation of ideas, practices, and values of all parts that participate in a system. If you try to discriminate against participants in order to get &quot;the culture you want&quot; then you&#x27;ll end up doing some nasty discrimination along the way. That practice is also, ime, heavily correlated with ideological hell holes that lose relevancy the minute they gain relevancy because they&#x27;re frozen in time along the timeline of acceptable ideas.

Noone could have known social media moderation could be hard! Just like in 2017 he had no way of knowing his cars wouldn&#x27;t drive themselves cross country by 2018

How about we start with not banning US politicians?

He personally considers Twitter to be an extension of the &quot;town square&quot;, so he wants to apply the laws of the government and turn them into the operational bylaws of Twitter. If the US government allows it in a &quot;town square&quot; then it&#x27;s automatically allowed on Twitter.

The bit about &quot;following the law&quot; was so poorly thought out. Musk&#x27;s comments at TED made it seem like he both:
(1) confused Bill of Rights guarantee that the government won&#x27;t censor speech with some law that prohibits private companies from moderating speech on their platforms (not a thing) 
(2) failed to consider what it means to &quot;follow the law&quot; when your platform operates in multiple countries with incompatible laws. Do you comply with an authoritarian regime that demands you take down tweets (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;5&#x2F;24&#x2F;22451271&#x2F;police-india-raid-twitter-tweets-government-manipulated-media" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;5&#x2F;24&#x2F;22451271&#x2F;police-india-rai...</a>)? How about content that is specifically banned in some countries but not others, like Germany&#x27;s strict hate speech laws (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;fact-check&#x2F;twitter-germany-nazis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;fact-check&#x2F;twitter-germany-nazis&#x2F;</a>)? These are actual problems Twitter has had to deal with, and I don&#x27;t get the impression that Musk realizes how complicated it it is.

Musk also does not run a rocket company. Musk owns a rocket company. Gwynne Shotwell runs it.

Tesla and SpaceX are technology&#x2F;engineering problems. This is what Musk is good at and can take huge risks to go after it. Twitter is NOT engineering or technology problem. The politics and policies are not Musk&#x27;s forte, at least not yet. However, the more concerning part is his continued defragmentation of attention. Tesla is now genuinly falling behind with massive new competitions rising up. New models haven&#x27;t been on market for a while. Previously announced models aren&#x27;t getting delievered. Pace of growth of superchargers is not keeping up. There is a lot at stack where Musk can make huge difference.

I like Elon, too, but &quot;no qualifications to run a rocket company&quot; is simply delusional. He majored in physics at Penn and econ at Wharton and went to grad school at Stanford studying material science (for two days, just enough to get to signal being smart). I have a harder time imagining what kind of background would be better being CEO of a rocket company.If he runs Twitter like 4chan, it will surely fail, but I think he has more to his plan than he is willing to share publicly at this time.

Musk had no qualifications to run a rocket company. He didn&#x27;t have much qualifications to run a car or solar company either. But he has done well by any measure of success. The only qualification that he seems to need is clear thinking based on first principles and genuine conviction and perseverance at super hard problems even while facing total personal destruction. And total personal destruction is always a real possibility with him – as he always seems to be all-in betting everything every time. So, if he fails spectacularly at his stated goal for twitter, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised (and neither will he be, I bet), but it would be sad to see that.

It’s fair to assume any substantial site with user created content has some significant agreements&#x2F;settlements with attorneys general in various jurisdictions. Those will likely be the stickiest, outside of ones with direct judicial determination.

To be fair, &#x27;free speech&#x27; isn&#x27;t even something a company can force themselves to follow. Short of selling to the US Government (who would have to explicitly accept such an offering), being bound by free speech isn&#x27;t possible without making your own rules for what qualifies as free speech and what happens when the platform &#x27;violates&#x27; it - ie. you can&#x27;t say &quot;take all matters of violating your first amendment to civil court&quot; since corporations, by design, cannot violate your first amendment rights.

But what exactly is “the law?” It’s not like this stuff is cut and dried even within the US. Posted this elsewhere, but free speech laws are some of the trickiest legal issues we grapple with in the US, and many statues hinge on the intent behind the speech. How is Twitter supposed to implement this (hypothetical) new policy? Do they always give posters the benefit of the doubt? Seems ripe for abuse. Assume the worst? Probably more censorious than it is today. Punt to the courts? Great, moderation now takes years and costs thousands of dollars. What is the standard of proof to take down a tweet? Preponderance of the evidence? What evidence is admissible? Does Twitter just internally recreate the US trial court system to manage this? What about cross-border disputes? What about laws that directly conflict? What about international law? Treaties to which the US is not a party (eg Protocols I &amp; II of the Geneva Convention)? If “following the law” were easy we wouldn’t have so many layers and judges

Does local = national? what about conflicts legally - or ethically as a US corp. China access using CCP rules. Russia too.

&gt; following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your &quot;side&quot;.Well, from that perspective I don&#x27;t think it can get any worse.

The full quote is “ elusive path of maintaining free speech, following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your &quot;side&quot;.”The path is balancing all that. It’s not just about people being “uncomfortable”, there is very real &amp; hurtful abuse on social media, some of which breaks laws that Twitter will also need to respect. Just adding more filters does nothing to build the open public square that Musk seems to want to curate. More filters &amp; blocks just creates smaller echo chambers.

&gt;the elusive path of maintaining free speechWhat&#x27;s so elusive about it? Let people say what they want and give users a robust word and account filtering system.If you think your ideas and values won&#x27;t stand up to public scrutiny, then perhaps you should do some self-reflection. If it&#x27;s just a matter of your own comfort, use the block&#x2F;mute&#x2F;blacklist controls.

He&#x27;s already said that he&#x27;d follow all local laws so it would be interesting to see if he can find the elusive path of maintaining free speech, following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your &quot;side&quot;.Personally my reservations are because I think running a social media site is a lot about understanding people and defining a healthy culture for your elusive market place of ideas. Musk has admitted he doesn&#x27;t understand people, is a self-confessed troll &amp; edgelord and and Tesla&#x27;s culture seems less than ideal. So lacks any of the qualifications I see as being needed to run something like Twitter. Maybe there&#x27;s some other Musk magic that will do what so many others have failed to do.

Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources