After a few weeks of ‘Will he buy it?’, we are now at the ‘Should he (be allowed to) buy it?’ stage – and that is not as much of a done deal as you might think. But we seem to be going through Elon Musk’s plan to buy Twitter without any real reference to ‘What is he actually going to do with it?’
We know what Musk wants from Twitter philosophically. The world’s richest man is a “free speech absolutist”. He wants the social media platform to be even more of a free-for-all than, say, Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner – the digital “public square”.
We also know a few of the changes he wants to make: an edit button, time-outs for egregious behaviour, a bot clean-out, and some type of subscription option. I’m not sure how the last one dovetails with the idea of a public square, but we’ll come to that.
Then, Musk has been clear that he does not see profit as a priority. Assuming regulators follow Twitter’s board in agreeing to the $44bn deal, he will take the company...