After acquiring Twitter for $44B, the world’s richest individual is now trolling its users, and removing people’s accounts he doesn’t like.
Elon Musk is a 51-year-old trustafarian, born to a wealthy South African emerald mining family.
While deleting user accounts, he claims that he wants to bring free speech to the social media platform. Last week, staff across the planet who moderate hate speech and racism were sacked.
The entire Human Rights Twitter team was dumped on November 5.
In his first week he has also threatened advertisers and amplified and empowered crazy people.
Twitter is actually very influential and useful. It’s not just politicians who project their policies – or the journalists who critique them; scientists, artists, comedians, academics and business leaders are highly engaged in the global conversation.
Musk calls himself ‘Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator’ on his Twitter handle, and replies to messages every few hours, according to his timeline.
He is also the CEO of Space X, Tesla, Starlink and Boring Co.
Given he spends so much time on Twitter now, it appears being a CEO isn’t a very demanding or important job.
Perhaps his account is run by bots? It makes sense given his interest and investment in AI.
There’s the Musk supporters, of course, who will prefer Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg (owner of Facebook/Meta).
‘At least Elon gets high’, tweeted Tommy Chong, of the famous Cheech and Chong comedy duo.
Back in April, Musk tweeted how important it was that the platform remain politically neutral.
Then, on Tuesday, he told his 115M followers they should vote Republican in the US mid-term elections.
Previously, he said he’s always voted Democrat. Imagine looking at the current US Republican Party, and deciding that now is the right time to get behind them?
It all looks like what happens when an individual gets unbridled, unchecked, untaxed power.
From the outside, it seems he operates without much focus, and plenty of ego.
Imagine what $44B could do for world hunger.
He was asked to do something on that last year by the UN, but didn’t.
To give a sense of scale, his purchase of one website outstrips the 2021 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of countries such as Mongolia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Madagascar, Nepal and Armenia.
What’s close to the approximate cost for his Twitter splurge is Libya’s GDP for 2021: $41.88B (US).
He has a fortune of $195B, and he appears well on the way to overtaking Iraq’s yearly GDP of $207.9B.
Hans Lovejoy, editor
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