Elon Musk buys Twitter for the “future of civilization”, explaining his decision to buy the platform during a TED conference. Wednesday night, he sent an offer to buy out Twitter and turn it into a private company.
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he said in the letter to Twitter. “However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”
He further explained his intentions during his TED talk.
“This is not a way to make money,” Musk told TED chief Chris Anderson. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO railed about Twitter’s lack of free expression, saying the business should open-source its algorithm to promote transparency in its content moderation choices.
“The code should be on Github so people can look through it and say, ‘I see a problem here,’ ‘I don’t agree with this,’ they can highlight issues, suggest changes,” said Musk.
“Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? And if that is the case, then we have free speech.”
“I think we want to be very reluctant to delete things and just be very cautious with permanent bans; timeouts are better.”
“I think everyone will still blame me for everything,” he said. “If I acquire Twitter and something goes wrong, it’s my fault, 100%. I think there will be quite a few errors.”