That grew quickly.
Musk bought a 9.2 percent stake in the micro-messaging service and said he would join its board, but now he wants the whole thing.
It is a game for him to take over one of the world's largest companies, as he revealed that he served an offer to buy its remaining stock at $54 per share.
The world's richest man didn't have enough to keep him busy, but it's still a mystery how he plans to execute his grand plans at Twitter while competently helming two large, ambitious tech companies. Musk wants to run three tech companies. It could be bad news for a platform that was finally starting to move in a healthy direction and the team that is taking it there.
It isn't perfect. The terrible hellsite and the one that occasionally gives us moments of transcendence have always been the same thing. During Russia's invasion of neighboring Ukraine, there was both a lot of misinformation and a lot of real-time open source intelligence. Jack Dorsey was both a self-serious tech mystic and one who occasionally had moments of real moral clarity that reverberated through the platform and its policies.
Musk is an emblem of the platform's worst qualities, as he is the antithesis of the leadership it needs right now. Musk conducts a formidable army of internet goons and regularly deceives the public about his heroic efforts.
We have to emphasize that Musk should have more than enough going on to keep him from doing a power grab at his favorite place to troll for internet points with weed and boob jokes.
Social media is very different from spaceships, and the first one isn't easy. Running a social media company is more important than running a company because of the harms that come from harassment, misinformation and negative impacts to mental health. Two of the most pressing threats to the social order, harassment and misinformation, are both caused by Musk.
Musk might think that he knows what's right for the business of Twitter, and maybe he does, he's very rich, which seems more than enough for most of life. New products, new revenue streams, and new users are some of the things that seem to be on the right course. The world's richest man might derail progress in the service of amusing himself.
After a long time of being inactive, the industry began to take steps to limit harms on its platform after the end of the Trump era. The company created new misinformation tools on the fly and opened up about its policy-making process with a refreshing admission that its set of rules was shaped by fallible people.
After years of pretending otherwise, it became clear that the most sensitive policy decisions came down to one person's hunch about what was either the most right, or at least looked the least wrong. The company issued a permanent lifetime ban on the president for inciting violence during the insurrection at the Capitol.
Jack Dorsey, who left his role as chief executive late last year, is no longer the hunch-haver. If Musk goes through with his plan, it might be a foolish idea to post anything you want to a privately owned social network regardless of the potential harm it may cause. It's not hard to imagine Musk reversing the progress on hate and harassment at the company. That is a bad thing.
In his letter to the board, Musk wrote that he invested in the company because he believed it could be the platform for free speech around the globe.
He said that he would "unlock" it.
For those of us who would like to see a more useful, less toxic utility for real-time information and very occasionally very funny jokes, it's good to know that Twitter is moving in a promising direction. From the company's desire to build an open standard for arithm to the new anti-harassment tools that are designed to mitigate its disproportionate burden on the often marginalized voices. Growth is under threat.
Last week after Musk appeared to reverse course on taking a board seat with his investment, Rumman Chowdhury, who directs the ethics team working on algorithmic harms, observed a chilling effect.
She praised the company for doing right by its employees by keeping Musk out of the henhouse, because she saw that the company had a beautiful culture of hilarious constructive criticism. The thread was muted because the troll have descended.
They have.
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