Published May 23, 2022
Elon Musk, new investors fund Twitter acquisition.
When average people hear the name Elon Musk, he is often conflated with tech moguls like Mark Zukerberg. Over the past few years, he made a lot more noise in the news doing things like moving his company Tesla to Texas, and avoiding California taxes. He said stuff about Covid, because obviously, everyone needs to know what he thinks about that. It has left many of us wondering, as he has done super weird stuff like SNL, who is this guy's PR? He might take a lesson from Zuckerberg on staying in his own lane...we don’t want to see rich tech guys try to be relatable on SNL, its uncomfortable.
Now we’ve come to Twitter...again, it seems like a weird move, but who are we to say, we’re just average people. Elon Musk holds the opinion that Twitter, much like Facebook and in fact most social media platforms, are a monopoly controlled by the left wing. He has voiced that Twitters shadow banning and DE platforming strategies are in his opinion, unfairly perpetrated against users with conservative view points. Elon Musk intends to lift the threat of taking ones account down for speech deemed inappropriate, or hateful by its current management. It will be a place where you can get crazy now, and he won't slap your hand for it. In a time when mass shootings are being live streamed on social media, zero restrictions sound super cool, right?
Musk got frisky with Twitter in early spring of this year. At the beginning of this month, he was lined up to purchase the company for 44 billion dollars. He's secured 7 billion in investor money from Silicon Valley financing, 13 billion in bank loans, 21 billion of his own cash and a 12.5 billion dollar loan against his shares in Tesla. This week he's threatening to back out based on findings that a large amount of Twitter accounts are bots? Something like that. He doesn’t seem worried about the billion dollar fine for ditching the deal. Cute.
All of this is to say, the richest dude in the world can apparently rally together just an imaginable amount of money to strong arm his way into essentially, whatever he decides he’d like to take over. But its cool, we’re all over here unable to fill the gas tank to get our trucks into work and there's no formula to feed our newborns but gosh do we love watching this stuff play out. And clearly the solution is that we should just buy a Tesla right? Stop whining about gas prices and cough up 140k!
The behavior Musk exhibited around his acquisition of Twitter left a bad taste in people's mouths. Dude acted like a bully, and a brat, and he seemed to be taking wild swings. The way Musk has handled the big moves he made recently all point towards being out of touch. Moving in such wealthy circles, and being reckless in any financial space in a way that trickles down with negative repercussions for real people, is irresponsible. Bottom line is carelessly handling the pull he has, is scary.
