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I Really Don’t Get The Evil Elon Musk Thing On Twitter

Yes, Musk has problems, but he is one of the most transparent billionaires I’ve ever seen.

ScottCDunn
4 min readApr 27, 2022

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Predictions are flying all over Twitter, within and without. A fair number of the people I follow have predicted the worst if and when Elon Musk completes his purchase of Twitter. So far, the board has approved the sale. The shareholders have not voted on the deal yet. I’d say the odds of success are high. But I don’t share the gloom and doom of my peers about the future of Twitter.

I’ve seen competing stories offered as motivation for Elon Musk to buy Twitter. I can’t remember all the details. One says that he’s working to shore up his relationship with the Federal Trade Commission. Another says that he wants to secure the humor of once banned, The Babylon Bee, and others that have been banned for skewering the elite. Maybe this is what he meant by “free speech”.

I’m optimistic that Musk will do the right thing with Twitter.

As far as billionaires go, Elon Musk is the most transparent of them all. He’s on Twitter, so he uses the product of a company he intends to buy. He built other businesses that make cars, provide satellite internet access, solar panels, and batteries to grow the net-zero economy, and a transportation company to facilitate travel through a tube at 700 miles an hour. All are powered by renewable energy.

The evidence I’ve seen so far is that Musk is a minimalist. He doesn’t seem to own a mansion. He has a microhouse in Florida that was built by Boxabl. He drives an electric car. I think we can confidently say that he lives a net-zero life for himself.

As to Twitter, he’s made several clear statements that he wants to relax the content moderation standards somewhat. I have the impression that he wants to eliminate the lifetime bans on Twitter. I would not be surprised to see Trump return to Twitter, despite Trump’s claims otherwise. And I don’t think that Twitter will descend into the hell that my progressive liberal peers on Twitter predict.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt has written numerous articles about the difficulty of content moderation at scale. On a large scale, content moderation is impossible to please…

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