Why Would Elon Musk Want to Buy Twitter?
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photograph by Patrick Pleul / AFP / Getty
The world’s richest man seems intent on preserving Twitter as a means for himself and others to continue influencing vast audiences without interference.
by Kyle Chayka
On March 14th, Elon Musk bought slightly more than nine per cent of Twitter, making him the public company’s largest outside shareholder. It briefly appeared that he would become a board member, a move that was announced by Twitter’s C.E.O., Parag Agrawal, but that possibility dissipated by April 10th. Then, on April 14th, Musk offered to buy the rest of Twitter and take it private, for fifty-four dollars and twenty cents a share. The offer valued the company at around forty-three billion dollars, well above its current market capitalization of almost thirty-six billion dollars. Musk’s efforts have kicked off a corporate drama worthy of “Succession,” inciting discussions of hostile takeovers, proxy battles, and board replacements to push the deal through. Musk himself is worth about two hundred and eighty billion dollars, thanks in large part to Tesla’s more-than-trillion-dollar market capitalization, and he has committed twenty-one billion dollars of personal equity to take Twitter private. The social network is small change. If Musk can assemble the funding, a deal of some kind seems set to happen. What’s less clear is his motive for pursuing Twitter in the first place.
Twitter is a notoriously dysfunctional business. It has failed to keep pace with its competitors, such as Facebook and TikTok, and its updates and new features have arrived only intermittently and confusingly, often angering users. Its advertising-based business model has barely changed since it launched in 2006. Yet Twitter is still at the center of culture-war debates and remains a pulpit from which to troll public discourse, even after the ban of Donald Trump, in 2021. Twitter’s status as both a total mess and extremely influential makes it an eternal target: it inspires strong opinions, including strategies to fix it and calls to just shut it down entirely.
Sometimes Twitter feels like the hot potato of the Internet, or perhaps more like a zone of nuclear radiation. No one wants to take too much responsibility for it—for years, Jack Dorsey was its C.E.O. only part time—and yet someone has to corral its potential for damage. Musk seems intent on unleashing it. His acquisition quest appears to be less about increasing the company’s profits—“This is not a way to sort of make money,” he has said—than preserving Twitter’s capacity for chaos as a tool for himself and others to continue influencing their vast audiences without interference. “I think it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech,” Musk said, during a ted-conference interview in Vancouver, on April 14th. “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” Even before his stock purchase was made public, Musk was tweeting to question if Twitter actually adhered to free-speech principles, and he has complained about the opacity of its algorithmic feed, its lack of an Edit button, and how some of its most popular accounts, including Barack Obama’s, have been posting less and less on the service.
Musk seems determined to restore a previous era, when tweeting had fewer consequences—making Twitter great again. He himself has suffered consequences because of Twitter’s being taken seriously as a public platform. In 2018, the S.E.C. brought fraud charges against Musk for tweeting about having the funds to take Tesla private at four hundred and twenty dollars a share, a move that led to his stepping down as the company’s chairman for three years and paying a twenty-million-dollar fine. (The share price that he named, which is a stoner reference, is a running theme of Musk’s juvenile sense of humor.) A judge recently ruled that the Tesla tweets were indeed false and misleading. The current threat to purchase Twitter might be seen as an act of revenge, a jilted fan’s reclamation project. Twitter’s most committed users often love the service and hate it with equal passion, two feelings that can coexist without much cognitive dissonance. The platform is awful—but its delivery of instantaneous feedback to every passing thought is also addictive. It’s exploitative—but its ability to amplify any message is unavoidably powerful. All the wrong people use it—but you wouldn’t want to be unwillingly cut off from it.
Twitter still serves many of the functions that made social media compelling in the first place. It’s a feed of real-time information, whether news, culture, history, or science. Any subject matter you can imagine has its resident Twitter experts who spend their uncompensated time composing threads about how their pet subject matter is relevant to the discourse of the day. Unlike Facebook, Twitter retains a sense of streamlined serendipity, in which a random, perfect observation can still be found without its being too crowded by ads and spam. Tweeting is also the ultimate stream-of-consciousness act; there’s no barrier between the internal monologue and the public debate. Its charm rests in its brute simplicity as a broadcast mechanism from one to many.
All of Twitter’s paradoxes were on display in the Times’ recent rejoinder to those journalists who are addicted to the platform. An April internal memo from the executive editor, Dean Baquet, argued that there was a “need to reset our stance on Twitter for the newsroom.” The running theme seemed to be that no one should feel the need to tweet, a compulsion that leads more often to journalistic trouble than achievement. “We encourage you to meaningfully reduce how much time you’re spending on the platform, tweeting or scrolling, in relation to other parts of your job,” Baquet wrote. The memo made two points in tandem: first, that the Times would protect journalists from harassment by online mobs (Musk’s mass of eighty-two million Twitter followers might count as one); and, second, that public critiques of Times colleagues would not be tolerated. Both points appeared to be in direct response to the experience of the journalist Taylor Lorenz, a former Times reporter who was hired by the Washington Post in February. Lorenz often tweeted about a lack of support from the Times when she faced attacks for her reporting on Internet-famous figures. She also used her own substantial social-media following to critique the work of the Times journalist David Leonhardt on covid and mask mandates.
More so than exercising free speech, the point of Twitter of late seems to be continuing the debate over speech itself: the abstract question of who can say what to whom, and where. The site’s purpose has changed in the course of the past decade. Its pre-2016 mix of public and private sentiments—a casual slew of whimsical thoughts, breakfast photos, and article links—has given way to a hyperawareness that every tweet is a public statement that could get you fired, sued, or ostracized. That kind of exposure can be powerful for those trying to attract an ideological audience—a type of user that Musk is sympathetic to, being an ideology of one—but it has a chilling effect on average users who aren’t aggressively trolling. Twitter’s option for a non-algorithmic feed and lax approach to content moderation, compared with other social networks, make it more immediately risky to use, like handling a loaded gun. It feels overtly weaponized. The pandemic period’s concentration of life online and general stir-craziness have only increased the capacity for snap reactions. Musk wants a Twitter on which anyone can say anything, but that kind of melee is actually part of the problem that’s causing the service to stagnate. Ownership by one of its biggest manipulators wouldn’t solve it.
Right now, Twitter is attempting to protect itself from Musk’s efforts. The company adopted a “poison pill” policy that dilutes the stock and makes a tranche of new shares available to current holders if any individual or group—led by Musk, presumably—acquires more than fifteen per cent. That would increase the cost to buy up the company. Yet there are other routes for a takeover, including convincing existing board members that an acquisition would be in the best interests of the business and a tender offer directly to shareholders. A regulatory filing on April 21st confirmed that Musk had arranged the full funding. A Musk-run Twitter is unlikely to be any more functional than it is now. Earlier, on April 19th, Musk tweeted, “A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy.” Rather than general well-being, that’s an equation for further radicalization and outrage, with those of us in the middle eighty per cent stuck trying to go about our online lives as best we can.