Twitter is a $44bn toy for billionaire Elon Musk to play with
The loudest reaction to Elon Musk buying Twitter, for some reason, has been concern about “free speech”. The second loudest reaction has been dismay about the fact that Elon Musk is a bad guy, and now he owns Twitter. I regret to inform you that both of these reactions are missing the point here – and the point is much, much scarier.
Will Elon Musk do anything meaningful to transform Twitter into a valuable and flourishing public square, a shining beacon of the power of untrammelled free speech to ennoble society, rather than the cesspool of neuroses, conspiracy theories and media feuds that it is now? Probably not. On the other hand, it’s already a cesspool. Can’t get too much worse.
Is Elon Musk a bad guy? Yes he is. He is a union buster, a selfish wealth hoarder, a man who holds the utterly wrong conviction that society owes him everything, rather than vice versa. He has this in common with virtually every other billionaire corporate titan. The only morally neutral billionaires are those who got their wealth more or less by accident, and who are working full time to give it all away as fast as possible. This is a very short list that does not include Elon Musk. On the other hand, it also does not include the founder of Twitter, another megalomaniacally misguided tech billionaire. In fact, most of the people who own or run most of biggest companies in the US are cut-throat profit seekers who would, no matter what their PR department says, put children to work in a knife factory for 10 cents an hour to add a half a percentage point to their quarterly earnings if they could get away with it. Twitter’s new billionaire may be somewhat more pernicious or more selfish than the old billionaire, but in the big picture, this is a marginal change.
No, the real thing that should be on your mind as a result of this stupendously rich nerd buying this company purely for kicks is this: the amount that a rich person feels comfortable spending on a toy has now reached $44bn. Twitter was, to be clear, a toy purchase for Musk. Nobody in their right mind believes that he bought this global company with 7,000 employees and hundreds of millions of users and a stock price that has gone nowhere for a decade for business reasons. He bought it because he is so, so astronomically wealthy that it is possible for him to pay $44bn in order to satisfy his vague personal appetite for mischief, to become the center of the universe of memes. The fact that this is true is a dark sign for us all.
You might have thought inequality was bad when you saw hedge fund managers paying more than $100m for garish apartments. You might have thought inequality was out of control when individual rich guys started paying more than $2bn for professional sports franchises. Ha. Those types of toys look absolutely paltry now. We have entered a new era at the Billionaire Toy Store – an era in which entire public companies will be plucked off the shelf and taken private not for any typical business reasons, but because some guy just happens to have some idiosyncratic ideas about how amusing it would be to do so.
The problem with having this much inequality – with having a tiny little nest of billionaires sucking up such a huge share of society’s wealth – is that the more wealth that individuals get, the less accountable to society itself they become. Their power to do whatever they want gets ever more unconditional. And that is dangerous. I don’t care if you like Twitter, or dislike Twitter, or have never heard of Twitter. This is not about Twitter. This is about a highly unequal nation in which one man can spend the equivalent of the annual budget of the state of Arizona for a shiny bauble, just because he feels like it. Some cling to the hope: “Perhaps the person who, through a twist of fate, finds himself the richest man in the world will be wise and just, so we don’t have to worry.” Unfortunately, nobody who is wise and just would ever be able to accumulate the $260bn net worth of Elon Musk without collapsing into a puddle of self-contradiction – and even if they did, they would spend it on (plausible!) things like “ending homelessness” or “solving world hunger”, rather than on “a goofy joke purchase that feeds seamlessly into my own out of control grandiosity”.
The inescapable conclusion here is that allowing people to get this rich is inherently dangerous to our delicate social balance, and also that only people with great moral flaws can ever become this rich. So we are guaranteed, if we let inequality continue unabated, to find ourselves more and more at the mercy of sociopaths. Democracy, for all its flaws, is redeemed by the one great insight that you can’t prevent sociopaths from existing, but if you spread power more or less equally around a nation, at least the sociopaths will be balanced out somewhat by the nonsociopaths. We have never, of course, achieved this perfect balance in reality. But now, it seems, we have stopped even trying.
Do not weep for Twitter, its users, or its investors. Weep for the entire chain of bad political decisions that allowed us to get to this point. This is just a preview. In the future, the billionaire toys won’t be quite so fun.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter at In These Times