The Battle of the Century: Here’s What Happens if Elon Musk Buys Twitter

In 2021 Elon Musk created overnight millionaires by pushing the Dogecoin meme. In 2022, he may be gearing up for something far more dramatic. The world’s richest man might be on the cusp of launching a global crusade to restore freedom of speech.

Is a new platform needed?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2022

Creating an alternative platform could be interesting, though several of these exist already. Twitter remains, by Elon’s own admission, the de facto public town square. Despite its severe censorship, it is still the only major digital public space where anonymous accounts can interact with celebrities, journalists and business titans (including Elon), where world leaders engage in spirited public diplomacy, and where dominant cultural and political narratives incubate and spread.

The most exciting possibility is therefore the most obvious one: Musk should simply buy a controlling stake in Twitter itself. He could certainly afford it. At $31 billion, Twitter’s market cap is less than 15 percent of Musk’s current net worth. Even if one regards Twitter stock as entirely worthless, Musk could theoretically buy a controlling stake in it and still be the world’s richest man by fifty billion dollars, and free speech would be restored to the “land of the free.”

But in practice, it’s not that easy. In fact, one would be hard pressed to imagine a project more dangerous and difficult than restoring free speech to a major tech platform like Twitter. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a more worthwhile project. Restoring genuine free speech would do more for patriotic Americans than the GOP taking back the White House in 2024, and it would pose a greater threat to the ruling Regime than anything Russia, China, or Iran might plausibly do.

Free speech online is what enabled the Trump revolution in 2016. If the Internet had been as free in 2020 as it was four years before, Trump would have cruised to reelection. Massive censorship and suppression are the tools needed to prop up Covid tyranny, the Ukraine war fever, and the idea that Lia Thomas is a “woman.” America’s decrepit and illegitimate ruling class intuitively understand this: Absolute freedom of speech, or even the speech norms that prevailed a mere decade ago, would instantly cause the American regime as we know it to crumble.

In short, transforming Twitter back into a real free speech platform would represent nothing less than a declaration of war against the Globalist [Anglo-]American [Zionist\ Empire. 

To fully understand why this is so, it is crucial to understand that Twitter is anything but a conventional “private company.” A company like The Home Depot might have a market cap ten times as large as Twitter’s, yet in terms of power and influence, who controls Twitter is profoundly more consequential. Home Depot would probably not remove its best selling paint cans or cardboard boxes from the shelves. Twitter, on the other hand, deplatformed its most high profile user, Donald J. Trump, while he was the sitting President of the United States. This is only the most dramatic example of censorious policy changes that restrict information flow and profit for Twitter.

In 2020 Revolver explored the Tucker Carlson Paradox: Tucker Carlson Tonight is the most popular program in cable news, yet no other networks try to imitate its content. The reason, we argued, is that ratings (and by extension profitability) are not even the real point of major news outlets:

For a media empire operating at the highest levels, the influence it wields on the public’s mind is far more valuable to the ruling power structure than any self-contained profit that could be generated by optimizing their news product to suit the taste of the audience.

This does not mean that profit is irrelevant to a media company. In Tucker’s case, his stratospheric ratings are a great tool of leverage, and without profit, a company must continually court new investors. But the point remains that for a serious media enterprise, profit is always secondary to influence.

READ THE REST: Power Over Profits: Here’s The Dirty Little Secret Behind The Media’s True Business Model

The Tucker Carlson Paradox applies in its most extreme form to a platform like Twitter. Twitter’s market capitalization of barely $30 billion is extremely modest by Big Tech standards. Even Snapchat is twice as valuable. And yet, as the global public square, Twitter is also the epicenter of narrative formation, a key promotional vehicle for journalists and celebrities, and an increasingly critical stage for public diplomacy and hybrid warfare between state powers. Twitter gets to decide which “freedom fighters” deserve to have their slogans go viral and which “authoritarians” and “domestic terrorists” need to be suppressed and censored. Twitter’s relatively marginal market cap belies the existential threat it would pose to every dominant institution in the United States (including the national security apparatus) if it implemented a policy of real unfettered free speech.

If Elon Musk bought Twitter and did nothing more than return it to the speech norms it had ten years ago, that act alone would constitute a “national security threat.” The threat posed to America’s joke institutions and the clowns who run them would be, in fact, existential.

This is not to dissuade Musk from purchasing Twitter — just the opposite, in fact. Revolver points this out to demonstrate how bold a move it would be — one of the very few which, if successful, would be a genuine game changer rather than a fake and performative gesture.

But if Musk opts for the path of boldness and glory, he should be prepared for historic backlash from the regime. The entire system would mobilize against Twitter reflecting the same cancellation strategies the Regime systematically employs to control politicians, websites, major businesses, and even countries. Twitter would get the “George Floyd” treatment on steroids. The Regime would employ the “George Floyd” tool recently used to “cancel” Russia, but directed with laser-like focus on a single company and its lone brilliant, iconoclast leader.

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