Twitter Sold to Elon Musk
The motor car businessman buys the California media company for $44 billion
Months after Autonomia published a letter to Elon Musk pleading with the space industrialist to invest in the free press and save America for Americans and free speech, Elon Musk bought Twitter (read the letter).
The Washington Post reported this afternoon that:
Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion on Monday, the company announced, giving the world’s richest person command of one of its most influential social media sites — which serves as a platform for political leaders, a sounding board for experts across industries and an information hub for millions of everyday users.
That the nation’s capital city newspaper owned by the man Musk replaced as the world’s richest human, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, published that slanted copy as a first paragraph reporting today’s breaking news demonstrates the seriousness of major media subjectivism. “Under the terms of the deal,” the Washington Post correctly reported, “Twitter will become a private company and shareholders will receive $54.20 per share, the company said in a news release. The deal is expected to close this year.”
For his part, Musk, who moved his SpaceX company from California to Texas after experiencing the oppression of California’s pandemic lockdown, released a statement:
Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
The news is good for free speech—at least for now—especially when one considers the context of today’s suppressed exercise of free speech. Musk posted on the platform that he “hope[s] that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.” In its article about the sale of Twitter, the Washington Post puts the term free speech within quotation marks.
Autonomia on Elon Musk and the Free Press
Firing Up the Free Press (7 March 2022)