Elon Musk Is Fighting for Attention, Not Free Speech

I didn’t wake up this morning planning to write about Twitter, and I’ve never woken up with the intent to write about Elon Musk. But this is the nature of Twitter: The spectacle sucks you in.

Elon Musk, equal parts innovator and troll, has announced a formal bid to acquire Twitter, a platform he’d recently begun to describe as “.” In the course of this line of thinking, Musk had (mostly on Twitter) that the company’s insufficient commitment to freedom of speech was fundamentally undermining democracy. Many others have made the same argument, pointing specifically to Twitter’s content moderation—its practice of taking down some posts, putting warning labels on others, and muting or suspending some accounts. Musk, however, is one of the richest people in, and instead announced a tender offer to buy the whole company and take it private at $54.20 a share. His motivation was either the desire to troll or the sincere belief that Twitter, which used to the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” had lost its way—or both.