man buys media company instead of going to therapy

Elon Musk, a frequent manipulator of the stock market and guy who accuses random people of being pedophiles, has bought one of the most influential media companies in the world. After weeks of pretending they weren’t into it, Twitter’s board accepted the billionaire’s $44 billion bid to buy the entire company.

I feel like therapy would have been cheaper, but okay!

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Right after the deal was announced Elon Musk published a statement outlining his intention to rid the platform of censorship, but some people are worried about the fact that his definition of free speech most closely resembles the one of a petulant toddler who refuses to nap until everyone sits in silence and watches Frozen for the 47th time.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

🚀💫♥️ Yesss!!! ♥️💫🚀

While Elon Musk wants the power to say whatever he likes, that same freedom doesn’t apply to journalists he has has frequently silenced and his own employees who have been forced to agree to hefty non-disparagement clauses for life. The billionaire is also fighting complaints from hundreds of Black Tesla workers who say it’s "a racially segregated workplace” where Black workers were subjected to repetitive racist slurs and other very horrifying things.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Elon Musk exclaimed while also being the man who once gave his employees a literal script to follow when asked if they liked working for him. “Yup, he’s a great leader! He motivates us to do great work,” his employees at The Boring Company were instructed to say according to documents obtained by Tech Crunch. And when asked about his meltdowns on Twitter, his workers were encouraged to respond “Elon is a public figure. We’re just here to provide an awesome transportation experience!” Feeding your staff lines about how great of a boss you are sure smells like free speech to me!

So how can Elon Musk be trusted to fix a problem that he himself embodies? Well that’s just what many billionaires do. As Anand Giridharadas writes in the New York Times they are often the problem masquerading as the solution. Whether it’s Twitter’s biggest troll claiming he can fix Twitter’s troll problem or Mark Zuckerberg claiming to save the democracy he himself single handedly weakened, plutes are gonna plute.

iconic

“If you’ve been paying attention to how things work in our plutocratic society, this turn of events won’t surprise you,” Giridharadas says. “The arsonists routinely cosplay as firefighters.”

But according to Scott Galloway in his newsletter No Mercy / No Malice, this focus on free speech is just a distraction from what’s really at stake: the concentration of power in the hands of a few men who have benefited from rules that they themselves refuse to follow.

“The argument about free speech and/or moderation is a distraction from the real issue: Should a small group of individuals — who ignore the guardrails that shaped their success — have so much power that they can acquire and/or extinguish media companies and the influence they command? This is about power, a lack of counterweights, and a history that confirms that when the ratio of power to guardrails becomes this imbalanced … bad things happen.”

So maybe instead of mandatory waiting periods for men who want to start podcasts, we should require mandatory therapy for rich guys who want to buy stuff.

Either way I’m going to need some therapy to process all of this.