Hannibal Hanschke/Pool Photo via AP
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives on the red carpet for the Axel Springer media award in Berlin on December 1, 2020.
Elon Musk, for the moment the world’s richest person, bought Twitter this week seemingly on a whim for a cool $44 billion, or roughly the GDP of Estonia. It’s a lot of money, but the deal is funded about half by debt, and so won’t even put much of a dent in his $290 billion fortune. It’s alarming news.
As Max Read writes, Twitter has become a de facto public square for most of the planet. Virtually every politician and government department outside of China has an account on there—and unlike Facebook, which increasingly serves as a bot-infested holding pen for your most deranged elderly relatives, Twitter has tremendous influence outside the platform. Journalists, think tankers, celebrities, and other bigwigs are on there all the time. I doubt Donald Trump would have become president without it.
Personally, despite Twitter being very helpful in my career, I’m not thrilled about a private company being such a central artery of global communications. But there is no denying that it is so important, and at least the reign of the previous airhead hippie overlord had the virtue of semi-benign neglect.
The fact that one person can liquidate a modest proportion of his net wealth—roughly equivalent to a middle-class person putting a down payment on a house in Cincinnati—and just seize control of this immensely powerful system is incredibly alarming. I suspect Musk won’t change much, because Twitter as it exists has been extremely useful to him, but there’s nothing stopping him from making any changes he wants (outside of a union drive, possibly). Worse, there’s no telling what kind of data he now has at his fingertips—imagine what might be found in the direct messages of politicians or celebrities? The 2016 campaign showed the power of compromising personal material dribbled out over months.
It’s all the more striking given Musk’s ludicrously inflated wealth figure. The valuation of Tesla—the overwhelming majority of his money—is consistently over $1 trillion (though it did slip below the mark on Tuesday). Its market capitalization is greater than the next nine most valuable automakers put together, despite the fact that it sells less than a tenth as many cars as Toyota alone, and continuing its current of super-rapid sales growth looks very unlikely given competition and commodity shortages.
The American status quo of low-to-nonexistent taxes on billionaires, slapdash financial regulation, and lax corporate regulation means we are all at the mercy of a handful of random ultra-rich oligarchs with the resources of entire nations at their fingertips. That kind of concentrated power makes a mockery of democracy.
