As Elon Musk buys Twitter, where do we go from here?

When Elon Musk’s best-known biography came out in the year 2015, the South Africa-born Paypal founder was only just transitioning from being regarded as somewhat of a mix between a hotshot ‘real life Tony Stark’ and the next Steve Jobs. At that time, it’s probably fair to say he was more Iron Man than the next Silicon Valley prophet. His Tesla was a year away from coming up with the Model 3 and SpaceX was still a while away from turning into the unmitigatedly reusable rocket-launching company it has become. 

Back then, two things could be said about him for sure - he liked solving the big problems - energy, space, Artificial Intelligence… And he thought social media was not solving any of these, rather the likes of Facebook were switching budding engineers’ focus from helping humanity to helping humans garner likes for their photos.

Cut to 2022, and Tesla is churning out half a million cars and tonnes upon tonnes of batteries a year from its gigafactories, and the cars can drive themselves. SpaceX has become the passenger liner for low earth orbit and Elon plans to colonise Mars. And apart from that, he’s trying to drill massive subterranean tunnels with his no-pun-intended Boring company to solve public transport. 

Are we missing anything… Oh! And he’s also the world’s richest man and he appears to have had a change of heart about social media. He still may not like Facebook much but he certainly thinks Twitter is ‘the world’s biggest town square’ and he feels so strongly about it that he’s arranged a king’s ransom, $43 billion dollars, an amount equivalent to crisis-hit Sri Lanka’s entire foreign debt, to purchase it outright, in cash, and turn it into what he calls an ‘absolutist freedom of speech’ platform.

But what will a Musk-owned Twitter mean? Well, the answer is anyone’s guess, and there are statements, conjectures, and fears. 

In terms of statements, Musk says first that “free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy” and that Twitter “will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” He says that Twitter “needs to be transformed as a private company”, because, “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”

In terms of conjectures, it’s no secret Elon Musk believes Twitter has a dark back alleyway, with shadow banning and tweaking of posts' and personalities' reach in abundance, and he wants to end this. He’s said he plans to make the feed algorithm public and open source, so any manipulation can be flagged. Where does he see limits of free speech? He says the answer is the laws of whatever country Twitter operates in. So Twitter under Musk will be free for expression, with reasonable restrictions comprising that country’s laws.

Another conjecture, that’s less altruistic and more befitting what one would expect from anyone who holds the moniker ‘world’s richest person’ is that he may use the consciousness of Twitter to farm inputs for his moonshot Artificial Intelligence Neural Link project. Or, at the very least, try to use it to synergise in a manner that only Musk can.

And that leads to the fears - The basis for Musk’s acquisition is that the current Twitter structure is not trustable. And that because Elon Musk is the world’s richest person already, he can be trusted with not falling victim to some of the trappings of ensuring bottom lines and that Twitter delivers on its shareholders’ expectations. But who knows the scale of whatever game Musk may himself have.

The celebrity runner of a company that deals with multiple governments, that wants to undertake truly transformative breakthrough-oriented quantum leaps in how we live, can wield enormous power with control of the world’s hottest platform for independent though and opinion moulding. So where will Twitter and the world go from here? Is Musk’s vision as altruistic as he’d like us to believe, or is this the pathway to a capitalist-dystopia? We’re going to find out.

(Image: MCU_Direct/Twitter/Unsplash/AP)