Elon Musk’s Vision for Twitter Should Scare the Hell Out of You

An unmoderated free-for-all is an invitation to bullies, bigots, and trolls that will further toxify social discourse

Tim Wise
6 min readApr 16, 2022

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Elon Musk, Image by DonkeyHotey, Flickr, Creative Commons license, Attribution 2.0 Generic

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and poster child for narcissism, is looking to buy Twitter.

Not just the 9 percent of shares he purchased last week, but the whole thing.

First, because as the world’s richest man, he can do things like that, and as a gigantic asshole (which comes with both the narcissism and the money), he figures why not?

Companies and other people are playthings to him.

So much so that his threat to buy Twitter might be little more than a PR ruse he thought up while staying awake for days at a time, as he’s rumored to do.

He gets off fucking with people this way.

It doesn’t matter to him if his words tank a company’s stock, boost it unrealistically, or lead investors astray.

It’s all for the lulz once you have billions to play with.

Some years ago, Musk started believing his press and the adoring puffery of online acolytes — like whatever idiot first likened him to Tony Stark — and it’s all been downhill from there.

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Tim Wise

Anti-racism educator and author of 9 books, including White Like Me and, most recently, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020)