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The story of Elon Musk’s acquisition, transformation and public rehabilitation of Twitter is nothing short of remarkable. Here is that rarest of confluences: A right-leaning (or at least right-sympathetic) mega-billionaire privately acquires a disproportionately influential public company out of genuine public-spiritedness, perhaps even a hint of noblesse oblige, and an earnest commitment to preserving open discourse in our modern digital public square; exposes grievous previous company wrongs for the whole world to see in a dramatic unveiling of the eponymous « Twitter Files »; and makes decisive personnel decisions to toss out core leaders of the wretched and corrupt old regime, and begins to chart a promising new path forward.
There has been no equivalent story in my adult lifetime, and there is unlikely to be a similar story again any time soon. This is not the type of corporate development one typically reads about in The Wall Street Journal or sees discussed on CNBC. The story is a unicorn.
The remarkable nature of the Elon Musk/Twitter saga, and the specific revelations about Twitter’s blacklisting of the infamous 2020 campaign-era Hunter Biden laptop story and its censorship/shadow-banning of myriad other right-leaning content creators, has led many on the right to fete Musk with praise – at times, even fawning adoration. To be sure, that praise is wholly warranted: Musk has thus far proven wrong the skeptics who were unsure just how big an impact he might be able to make at Twitter, answering the call of his civic duty as the world’s wealthiest man. Indeed, he has gone above and beyond his civic duty.
But as transformative as Musk has been in the nascent stages of his Twitter ownership, it is crucial to not forget the bigger picture.
Twitter, though the preferred communicative organ of the American political class and the broader commentariat, pales in comparison to most other Big Tech platforms in terms of its reach.
