Musk’s Twitter bid is astonishing in its cost, but not in its imagination.
It has been nine years since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, and it’s worked out pretty well for the paper: The Post has become a renewed force in national news and was a vital source of coverage of the Trump White House. Its headcount has more than doubled. At the time, James Fallows wrote that the purchase might signal a happy turning point for journalism: “The beginning of a phase in which this Gilded Age’s major beneficiaries re-invest in the infrastructure of our public intelligence.” A happy turning point for the Post, yes. For the rest of us, not so much. I thought of Fallows’ hopeful prediction on Thursday morning, when the news broke that Elon Musk was making a $43 billion bid for Twitter. Alexa, show me the opposite of the “infrastructure of our public intelligence.” Musk is trying to spend a fortune on a social network that has made us all dumber, in order to make it dumber. Or at least, more hostile. It’s a cliché at this point to say that the richest people on Earth don’t know what to do with their money, but the world’s richest man deciding to drop $43 billion on Twitter because he’s mad at the mods might beat out the other world’s richest man flying a bunch of celebrities to outer space as a way to light money on fire. Musk is right, unfortunately, about Twitter’s importance as the internet’s preeminent public forum. (The Twitter paradox: It is both stupid and important.) But his vision of it as a ruder, rawer, freer place is as uninteresting as it is inconsequential. Spending one of the world’s greatest fortunes to restore the version of Twitter as it was in 2018—the year Musk called a British diver who rescued a Thai soccer team from a cave a “pedo guy”—is not the revolutionary initiative that either his supporters or his detractors believe. Twitter itself is resisting the offer, for now. Regardless, Musk’s venture speaks to the abdication of civic responsibility that characterizes the billionaire class at large.
