Oh man, Elon Musk pulled off a stunning, head-shaking move in the last month; he announced to his more than 80 million followers on Twitter that he was considering developing a social media platform which would be centered around free speech. Everyone assumed that he was planning to spend his billions to create an entirely new platform. But he fooled everyone.
Nice move, Elon.
According to reports, he went ahead and purchased a huge portion of Twitter.
Sourced from the BBC:
Elon Musk has taken a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, according to an US security filing.
The announcement was a shock to the system, sending Twitter shares up by about 25 percent in pre-market trading.
Musk is a frequent Twitter user, having more than 80 million followers. However, recently, he stated that he's giving “serious thought” to building an entirely new social network.
Last month, Musk was asked by his fans if they believed the social media platform allowed free speech.
While I'm no neurosurgeon, if you buy almost 10% of something, and you spend more than three billion dollars, I would say that this will make you an integral part of the business in a matter of hours.
Musk hasn't kept secret that he's a detractor of the way that the major social media platforms have dealt with any views that the top brass of these companies doesn't like. Musk is among the few who has an enormous fan base on social media and the resources to take action.
As my friend Brandon Morse covered in the past month, Musk does not seem to be a person who is a fan of woke corporate culture. Twitter is a sludge pool of this.
Elon Musk has made it clear that he doesn't have patience or time for woke culture. For sure, social justice activism is essentially stifling itself in various ways to satisfy a popular momentary trend.
One thing Musk appears to have a distinct dislike for can be what's known as the “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) standards that, effectively, are an activist's wish list for leftist corporations to cross off to ensure activists know what they can invest their money in. In the event of not adhering to these standards, it could result in your company receiving a smear campaign from activists, and some bad press.
Like many leftist activists, they've jumped on the bandwagon to want war in Russia, so as to secure Ukraine and, as a result, ESG funds are now going to companies in defense that manufacture weapons for antagonistic regimes, according to the entrepreneur Marc Andreessen.
Musk is also prepared to pay a price to help the current economic crisis, as I have written here a few weeks ago.
Evidently, Musk made the decision that it would be simpler to influence a business which is already in existence, and in which he enjoys a large following, instead of establishing a brand new company from the ground up. That's why Musk has been as successful as he has been. He is able to move and get a lot.
It's the exact move I was thinking Trump would make after his departure from the White House in 2021. Joining forces with investors and buying stakes into the company that barred him and others who backed him, for supposedly violating terms of service guidelines which nobody knows, could have been a big move. Violations of the false Terms of Service have silenced the majority of users on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Given Musk’s track record of being successful in everything that he does, the sky's the limit for Twitter, and perhaps they'll let go of their smug attitude of suppressing all things that hurt their feelings.
Let's see if this can work.
