Although it’s too soon to be sure, the early signs are not looking good for Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, thereby demonstrating once again how easily the concentrated power of the media can destroy those whom it turns against.
The South African-born Tech entrepreneur entered the fray having several seemingly huge advantages. He already ranked as the wealthiest person in the world by a considerable margin. His Tesla Motor Company, constituting the bulk of his fortune, pioneered the electric vehicles that have become a major status symbol of affluent liberals, and despite a considerable decline in its stock, was still comparable in value to the combined total of the world’s next half-dozen automobile manufacturers. He simultaneously served as CEO of SpaceX, America’s best hope for continued domination of space, and its associated Starlink satellite network had recently proven itself a huge factor in modern warfare. Musk was not only ranked as an enormous technological hero, but he had also accumulated considerable media influence of his own, with his 118 million followers on Twitter probably giving him the reach of a major television celebrity or even an entire broadcast network.
Indeed, Twitter had become so important to him that earlier this year he boldly offered to buy the struggling social media giant and take it private. A decade ago, a leading Twitter executive had memorably described his company as representing “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and Musk seemingly intended to roll back the mounting tide of censorship and restore it to that position.
For generations “free speech” had been one of the most universally cherished American values, but after Donald Trump used the power of his free speech on Twitter to unexpectedly win the White House, those prevailing sentiments very rapidly changed, and the need to exclude “fake news” and suppress “hate speech” became the accepted priority of all right-thinking individuals obedient to the narrative of the mainstream media. Beginning with a few extreme cases here and there, the resulting Twitter purges grew exponentially, until by early 2020 these had finally claimed the sitting President of the United States; and powerful elements of American society were very concerned that Musk might try to reverse that process. So his takeover of Twitter, substantially funded from his own pocket, was viewed by many as a horrifying and potentially dangerous threat to American values, with Musk himself increasingly portrayed as a Bond-style super-villain by the buzzing media beehive, an interloper whose nefarious plans had to be frustrated at all costs.
Twitter had already been losing money and the $14 billion in debt Musk took on to help fund his purchase made the situation far worse. Once the media painted him as a dangerous bad-thinker and Twitter suddenly became “controversial” his timorous advertisers—who provided nearly all of its existing revenue—began dropping away, with each public desertion being loudly broadcast by the hostile media megaphone.
All of these major blows came despite Musk’s partial reversal of his self-proclaimed “free speech absolutism,” as he promised to maintain many of Twitter’s existing restrictions and except for a certain former President only reinstated the most milquetoast of purged Tweeters. Musk’s U-turn immediately drew angry denunciations from some of the same individuals who had previously championed his takeover.
When expenses rise and revenue falls, financial problems result, and journalists reported that Musk had privately warned of the risk of bankruptcy as he prepared his drastic cuts to Twitter’s bloated workforce. Meanwhile, most of the company’s previous senior executives were fired or quit.
Earlier this month, Musk had intentionally slashed Twitter’s headcount by 50%, but on Thursday his media critics gleefully reported that one- third of his remaining staff had suddenly quit, with many of his crucial software engineering teams having almost totally disappeared. The front- page headline in the hostile New York Times was “Twitter Teeters on the Edge” and it darkly suggested that the company might be entering a software death-spiral, hardly encouraging news for the remaining corporate advertisers who were so necessary for its survival. I’ve never much used Twitter myself, but if I’d invested years of my time and effort in building up millions of followers, I’d be feeling pretty worried right now.
Perhaps Musk will once again ultimately triumph against the odds, and successfully create the universal WeChat-type service he has envisioned. But right now, I think it much more likely that the seemingly fragile social media giant will continue to decline then ultimately wind up in different hands. And if our media can so quickly and easily crush the aspirations of the wealthiest man in the world, perhaps costing him and his financial backers the $44 billion they had invested, who in the future would risk another such challenge?
Perhaps by coincidence, a somewhat similar controversy had recently played out in the case of a different high-profile individual, the billionaire black rapper and fashion designer Kanye West. Although I’d previously had only the vaguest impression of him, he was apparently a towering international celebrity, as well as being among the wealthiest black Americans who had ever lived, while having tens of millions of followers on Twitter and other networks.
Apparently for some reason or other, he became angry and agitated over what he saw as the overwhelming Jewish influence in the worlds of business and media, and began loudly saying so in various venues and on his social networks. As might be expected, the media reaction was swift and devastating, portraying him as a moral leper, and thereby forcing most of his business partners to cut their ties, often at enormous financial cost. Apparently 25% of the profits of footware giant Adidas came from West’s line of sneakers, but they abandoned the longtime deal at a total cost of almost $650 million when their media masters proclaimed it as a fundamental issue of morality. At the other end of the spectrum, Goodwill Industries announced that they would no longer offer their impoverished clientele the donated cast-offs associated with such a vile anti-Semite. The rapper’s longtime bank even closed his accounts and would no longer provide a haven for his money.
The immediate result of all these coordinated blows was that the bulk of West’s large fortune suddenly evaporated, while his (Jewish) personal trainer publicly declared that if he continued his bad behavior the erstwhile billionaire might end up spending the rest of his life heavily drugged and imprisoned in a mental institution. Almost none of his fellow black celebrities rallied to his side, or if they did, I didn’t hear about it. The story soon dropped from the media, perhaps permanently taking with it the once-iconic global black celebrity.
West’s high-profile transgressions had put our ideological watchmen on full alert and this probably accounted for the new controversy that soon engulfed black basketball star Kyrie Irving, who ran into a media buzz- saw for merely Tweeting out a link to an Afrocentric documentary available on Amazon. The controversial claims made in that video riled up the ADL, and Irving quickly offered public apologies and a payment of $500,000 to salvage his sports career. But that tentative deal unraveled due to his subsequent impolitic remarks, and he was suspended from basketball, while his personal line of sneakers was cancelled by Nike. Yet another abject lesson proving that even the highest and the mightiest should think twice before exercising their right to free speech. The media creates reality and if they decide to declare you a target, you quickly become a human pin-cushion.
Back in the 1990s, Bill Gates was much in the news, with his $100 billion fortune then ranking him as the wealthiest man in the world, a position he had held for so many years that it seemed permanent. His Windows operating system enjoyed a near-monopoly on all personal computers, so his products controlled the technological infrastructure of every country, just as every writer and financier depended upon his ubiquitous Word and Excel programs. Given such potent assets, he was sometimes half-jokingly described as the most powerful person in the world, having clout that dwarfed that of any President or Pope.
While I did not necessarily dispute such an appraisal, I would always point out the severe limitations of his position. I proposed a thought- experiment in which the Monarch of Microsoft carelessly uttered some highly untoward views on any one of a number of sufficiently touchy subjects. For all his money and influence, he probably would have been quickly annihilated, fried to a crisp by a concentrated media blast and then overwhelmed by the massive wave of public revulsion that it generated, quite possibly losing his company and much of his gigantic fortune in the process. Bill Gates might have been powerful, but the media could have destroyed him at a stroke, snuffing him out like a candle in a gale-force wind. The current fates of Elon Musk, Kanye West, and others suggest that I was probably correct.
The ADL seems to have played a central role in all these current controversies discussed above, with Musk quickly bowing to its authority and soliciting its advice, while the organization led the successful attacks on West and Irving. Such developments were hardly surprising given its notorious reputation, but the ADL’s reaction to my own past activities had followed a strikingly different trajectory. As I wrote four years ago:
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