Who Is Elon Musk?

            My VIP for this week is Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and the person who owns the largest block – 9.2% - of Twitter stock. He was at first a passive interest owner but soon changed to an active interest owner. He is now on the board of directors for the social media giant. Douglas Blair at The Heritage Foundation asked this question: “what does all of this really mean?”

            Blair turned to Annie Butler, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy for an answer. She concluded that Musk’s taking an active interest at the company is a step towards more free speech at Twitter. In a podcast with Blair asked Butler what this information about Musk mean for Twitter, and she replied with the following: 

So, we don’t actually know specifically what’s going on inside his head, but we can only hope that this means really good things for free speech, bringing the platform closer to working along the sides of the First Amendment, and just actually acting on being the de facto public town square.

In his tweet, which was, I think, March 25^th – this is the one that we are really interested to see if [it] actually comes true and he holds Twitter to – he said, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to the principle?” And it was a poll to the public. And his Twitter followers, 70.4% said no….

So to him, he followed that up the next day and tweeted out, “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done? And he left it open-ended to his followers.

So obviously, now we know that he had, at the time, purchased that amount of shares of the company. So we’re hoping to see those ideas of holding Twitter to the account of actually being a public town square and operating along the lines of the First Amendment, we hope that he actually can get that done.

            Musk is a successful businessman and the richest man in the world. We can be sure that he did some deep thinking before he purchased 9.2 percent of Twitter. We know that he has a plan, but he has not shared his plan yet. We can only hope that Twitter makes more effort for free speech.