Elon Musk, Twitter's Lamest User, Is Now Its Biggest Shareholder

As of today, we’ve got a new development in Elon Musk’s weird, love-hate relationship with Twitter. After spending the last week or so complaining about free speech on the platform, because that is what petulant rich men do on twitter these days, he’s purchased a 9% stake in the company, which makes him Twitter’s single largest shareholder. It’s still unclear to me exactly where the Twitter free speech stick Musk sat on lies, as pretty much the only thing that gets you a wrist-slap on there is physical threats or doxxing people (sometimes). The other possible “violation of free speech” is the SEC investigations he’s received from using the platform to make weird financial statements that juice stocks or cryptocurrency.

The purchase is made a bit more ominous by a recent series of tweets from Musk, the first a twitter poll asking if people think Twitter adheres to the principle of free speech, followed by a reply saying “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” As for the poll, those saying Twitter did not adhere to this principle won with 70%, which, sure, especially because any post like this is a conch shell to the internet’s most froth-mouthed users. Internet polls are not a good method of collecting actual public sentiment, unless the public sentiment you want is that a new flavor of Mountain Dew should be called “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong.” An internet poll that asks people to “vote carefully” is like when a White Claw ad asks people to “Drink Responsibly.”

Now, with what seems like a possible buy-out of Twitter by Musk on the horizon, I think there’s reason for a slight bit of worry. Not because I really think anything dangerous would change on the site, I’m not a terrified doomsayer. It’s just the danger of Twitter being owned by truly one of its lamest users. Elon Musk’s timeline reads like a blend between a r/funny comment aggregator and a spam bot. It’s epic bacon crypto all the way down. 

I understand he’s an unimpeachable hero to a big subset of Funko Pop owners because he’s used all the money he earned from owning a way to buy Magic cards off ebay in 1998 to pay actual scientists to make rockets that sort of work. And I give him all due credit for co-founding Paypal with money from his father’s emerald mine. And by co-founding, I mean by being the CEO of a similar company, X.com, that was merged with the company that ACTUALLY developed PayPal, getting fired as CEO before its major success, and collecting tens of million dollars off the sale. But his twitter sucks.

So congrats to anyone who owns twitter stock today, as Musk does what he’s best at, which is artificially pumping a business’s value. Hopefully, if a buy-out does take place, we’ll all enjoy the future of twitter as a marketplace for NFTs of Michael Scott GIFs or whatever.

Top Image: Steve Jurvetson/Pixabay