Elon Musk attracts strong opinions. Becoming the richest man in the world almost by accident, reveling in sharing opinions that poke the woke hornets’ nest, and having a sense of humor might have something to do with it. None of these three (at least, at the same time) pertain to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Warren Buffet. If we’d had social media in the 19th century, I suspect Jay Gould might have enjoyed Twitter, and Musk’s buccaneering spirit reminds one of the Hunt brothers, who tried to corner the silver market in the early 80s.
I’m a fan. Unlike most of his critics, I’ve read and listened to sources other than the mainstream media about his origins. I don’t imagine he would be easy to work for, any more than was Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. Driven men of genius who want to create and build don’t have time for 40-hour weeks, or work-life balance, or caring too much about people’s feelings. They don’t build dog-runs and supply beanbags and ping-pong tables and let everyone pretend to work from home. It’s a good thing not all bosses are like that, but without some, America would never have gotten off the ground.
Andrew Carnegie gave libraries to thousands of towns, a lake to Princeton, and wrote something like ‘he who dies rich, dies thus disgraced’ before giving most of his money away. That said, he was a tough bastard in business, crushing strikes, undermining competition, and creating U.S. Steel through ruthlessness as much as acumen. Born a penniless Scot, he valued hard work and charity, but also tough-nosed and occasionally unfair competition. John D. Rockefeller didn’t build Standard Oil without breaking some rules, moral or otherwise. The Robber Barons of the 19th century, in fact, were the impetus for the Progressives (the Teddy Roosevelt, Bob LaFollette kind, not their modern parodies) to legislate limits to monopolies, mechanisms to crack down on corruption and insider trading, and other features we take for granted that attempt, never altogether successfully, to level the business playing field.
Man is acquisitive by nature. Those that are most equipped by brains, energy, and aggression to make enormous sums of money by creating, trading, and building, are not always also granted the traits of compassion and empathy; the milk of human kindness often runs thinly in their veins. A wise democracy harnesses the energy of such men; it allows them full expression of their genius, for their own and the common good, but with some limitations to keep them reasonably honest and reduce the harm of their excesses.
Musk is an immigrant from South Africa via Canada where his mother had roots and family. He got a BA in economics and physics, then cut short graduate school at Stanford to start a software company which he sold for $300 million. He rolled all the profits into an online payment platform which eventually merged with others and became PayPal. He then rolled all those profits into SpaceX, Tesla, and other ventures.
When Tesla nearly went bankrupt a decade ago, Musk risked losing most of his net worth. To keep your profits on the table once takes chutzpah. To do it three times, and come out the richest man on Earth, takes once-in-a-generation balls. Musk gave an interview to the Babylon Bee, an excellent satirical online news site and podcast, in which he talks of his journey. He speaks somewhat haltingly, but with humanity, modesty, and humor. Never does it appear that he is motivated to do what he does by money; he seems more to find inspiration in curiosity and solving problems.
Anyone looking for a business motive underlying his purchase of Twitter for around $45 billion doesn’t understand Musk. Still, he may well pull out of this with much more than he invested; he has what Napoleon called the most desirable quality in a general – luck. He also knows how to improve a business, and Twitter is clearly not as profitable as it might be. Look for Musk to appoint smart, hard-charging loyal lieutenants to replace the current charisma-free nerds running Twitter, who seem far more concerned with flying the woke flag and keeping out mean tweets than with making money for their shareholders.
Musk has been called all kinds of things by those who run the media in the U.S., mainstream and social, who are leftist to the core. They hate his wealth, his ambition, and his irreverence towards their shibboleths. Yet, he is socially liberal, more Libertarian than anything else on economic issues, and let us not forget, has done more to save the planet by making electric cars normal and desirable than every single Brooklyn or L.A. blogger has by whining about climate change.
Musk is an entrepreneur, a free-thinker, and a futurist. His Space X has sent people to space on recyclable rockets while NASA was worrying about what pronouns to call its staff by. His Boring Company and hyperloop ventures offer an actual solution to over-crowded, traffic-choked city transportation, while U.S. major cities can’t even rid themselves of downtown campsites filled with drug addicts.
In short, Musk gets things done. He will make Twitter better. Not that this is a high bar – the site is a fantastic sharing space for thought of all kinds, but the algorithms and back-office shenanigans that limit certain opinions (conservative, skeptical) while promoting others (woke, progressive) are unfair, opaque, and reflect the bias of Twitter’s staff, who according to one recent report gave more than 99% of total individual political donations to Democratic candidates versus less than 1% to Republicans. When conservatives criticised Twitter for this, the left said it is a private company, we can do what we like, go build your own. With the shoe on the other foot, they will now argue like true hypocrites that Twitter is the public sphere and should be regulated.
Under Musk’s ownership, Twitter will improve. It will still be a platform of 300 million plus users, a large percentage of whom are mean, illiterate, uninformed, Russian bots or all of the above, but it will also allow the promulgation of good ideas and fast-breaking news. Ideological bias will lessen; Musk is sincere in his support of free speech. The mainstream media of yore cannot be saved. Consumers who seek truth and objectivity must look wider and read smarter and more skeptically, and Twitter is one place to look. Sooner or later other trusted platforms will emerge from Substack, podcasts, and longer-form Twitter entries if Musk has his way. Brands like the New York Times and CNN will die with their credibility in shreds, while new ones form loyal audiences by providing solid, well-informed, and objective content. It has happened before – who remembers the National Gazette or the Federal Republican? Who can name what paper made William Randolph Hearst rich? Where is the Yellow Press that ‘Remember[ed] the Maine’? They wrapped fish long ago.
Musk took over Twitter because he was pissed that they banned people for speech that may have offended some but was in no way beyond the limits of the Constitution and American tradition. One example was the Babylon Bee’s joke about Rachel Levine (a biological man, who lived as such for half a century before becoming a transwoman and senior member of the Federal health bureaucracy) being their Man of the Year. Twitter’s lifetime ban of Donald Trump was another.
Musk believes that what is not illegal in speech should be legal, and not the other way round. He is a Gen X-er, not a Gen Z snowflake afraid of nasty words. He welcomes criticism of himself, and like a sensible man with too much to do, he will just ignore or block it rather than staying under the covers obsessing and complaining. The sooner today’s generation learns that silence is not, in fact, violence, and that words cannot, of themselves, inflict ‘harm,’ the better off they will be and the more equipped for life. I welcome Musk’s takeover of Twitter and wish him all success in reforming it.