Can Elon Musk Run A Business Without Government Subsidies?
With Twitter, we’ll find out! Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity certainly relied on tons of taxpayer dough
Assuming all goes well with his impending bid, Elon Musk will soon own Twitter.
And what happens next?
There’s plenty of speculation, and I don’t really have much to add to the already-expansive predictions. It seems likely that Musk wants, at minimum, to roll back the work Twitter has done in recent years (however imperfect) to rein in harassment and hate speech. I think that’d be a mistake for many reasons: The most obvious is the human damage we’d see if Musk re-septicizes Twitter, but there could also be short-term financial repercussions for the site. Advertisers don’t much enjoy running ads next to rape threats.
It’s a bit tricky to really know what Musk truly intends do. Quite apart from the intellectually half-chewed “free speech” stuff over which Musk perseverates — informed by his dysmorphic sense of the country’s political spectrum — Musk has spitballed a lot of different ideas for Twitter.
Some of these seem daft to me; others, I’d endorse. He’s talked about encrypting DMs (a very good idea), defeating spambots (also good), open-sourcing Twitter’s algorithm (probably…
