Sooner or later – at dinner, the gym, or a PTA meeting – someone will ask you: “What do you think of Elon Musk wanting to buy Twitter?” Here’s what to tell them.

Like most people, you probably haven’t given it much thought, or your thought pattern may go something like this: if the man who made affordable space exploration possible and made the electric vehicle a reality – all while finding time to host SNL, fathering eight kids, and sleeping with the hottest women alive still has the energy and the money to buy Twitter, why shouldn’t he?

As for the truth about Elon Musk, the answer to that question is far more complicated than it seems – as Keri Kukral and I recently began to expose in part one of the “Secret Life of Elon Musk” series on NarativTV. 

Firstly, you should know that the Elon Musk story is a well-constructed fabrication. Of course, he’s an actual human, but the narrative he tells the world is inconsistent, suggesting it is part obfuscation, if not complete fiction.

Chief among the obfuscations is his wealth. Musk may be the world’s richest man (worth, on paper, $264 Billion), but in reality, he’s cash-poor. He’s only worth the amount of money a bank will loan him against a portion of his current stock in Tesla. We found out last week a bank would loan him $25 Billion to fund the purchase of Twitter, but we don’t know much more about the origins of those funds.

Musk is a creation of a large conglomerate of wealth made up of foreign and domestic interests. That’s not to say Musk is not intelligent or capable. Of course, he is, but he hasn’t ever really created anything himself – except for maybe a program called “zip2it”. Musk acquired everything else from PayPal to Tesla. And he’s failed more times than he cares to admit. 

Musk’s unorthodox approach to management is viewed as inherently risky and could present risks to his future holdings. TESLA and SpaceX are financially intertwined, which is unusual for two publicly traded companies – each borrowing from the other to avoid public collapse. If the stock falters or the technology fails in one company, both companies could come crashing down. If Musk succeeds in buying Twitter, the social network’s fate will also lie with Tesla and SpaceX.

We’ll have astronauts stranded in orbit, cars careening off the roads, and the virtual town square inexplicably grinding to a halt. Musk’s track record on democratic values is dodgy at best, and the SEC is investigating his businesses. Twitter is too essential to democracy to entrust it to him. Someone as cavalier and reckless as Musk is pursuing profit should not be in charge of regulating free speech in the town square.

Musk says he wants to buy Twitter to “save civilization”.

I agree with his underlying premise that Twitter is essential for civil discourse. Twitter is the virtual town square in an epic battle between autocracy and democracy.

If you have something to say and a box to stand on and are willing to endure the hecklers and trolls, you can say it on Twitter.  Viewed this way, Twitter has become the last remaining vestige of unfettered free speech.

Musk may be right that Twitter is essential for saving civilization, but what does he mean? People who use the word “civilization” — people like Putin, Xi, Trump, monarchists, and actual monarchs like soon-to-be King Charles use it in a particular way. 

They have a hankering for the good old days – where the elite held sway and lorded over their subjects, governed by a sense of entitlement by birthright that they alone should chart the course of human development. They bestow favor and wealth on the loyal and dispatch zealots, disease, war, and famine on those who are not. Anything and everything to strike fear into our hearts. A modern-day equivalent of the plagues of Passover at the end of another civilization from a long-forgotten time. 

These so-called kings and dictators sell us religion as an opiate and deal opiates as religion – anything to tame the unruly masses – in the name of wealth and power.

Zev Shalev and Keri Kukral recently exposed Elon Musk in part one of the “Secret Life of Elon Musk” series on NarativTV. 

A few years ago, it became apparent to these masters of the universe that we were approaching a tipping point. The disparity between rich and poor had crossed over a significant milestone and suggested the conditions were ripe for a global revolution against the wealthy. 

When a black man named Barrack Obama walked into the White House in January 2009 and became one of the greatest American presidents in history, as he ushered in the Arab spring, you could sense the enemies of democracy recoil. 

The enemies of democracy responded with a hybrid offensive which included installing Donald Trump as president and a psy-op called Q-Anon. On MSNBC last week, a pundit described Q as an assault on the media. A conspiracy theory so pervasive and filled with inaccuracies it raised doubt over the source of truth – the media.

The same people who created Q spawned amplification networks like OAN and Newsmax and turned Fox News into a parade of idiocy – and gave us Facebook, a social network capable of burrowing under our skins and mainlining designer fear into every citizen. The perfect accompaniment to a president who decried everything as fake news.

Truth is an effective weapon against tyranny.

Challenge even the most potent liars with a fundamental truth, and they shrink in size. The battle over democracy is not about weapons and land – it’s about the hearts and minds of men and women who inhabit that land.

You see it in the courage of the Ukrainian armed forces. They know firsthand what authoritarianism looks like and refuse to go back. They are not just fighting for their survival – they are fighting for generations of people oppressed by mad kings and cold-blooded dictators.  

Elon musk may present himself as a modern-day liberal, but he is not that. He, like me, is a product of Apartheid South Africa – he comes from the capital Pretoria – an oppressive place where only the most ardent white nationalists resided. I grew up in the white liberal suburbs surrounding the metropolis of Johannesburg, or what is today Jo’burg. I had a healthy distaste for the apartheid regime – notoriously racist and homophobic. My first job as a rookie journalist was at a radio station that helped eradicate apartheid. Radio 702 was the equivalent of Twitter in South Africa – a town square where listeners could discuss all topics out of the reach of government censors. 

Musk is a libertarian with autocratic tendencies and a supporter – at least in the 2016 election – of Donald Trump. His recent transformation into a free speech activist isn’t about giving the oppressed unfettered access to the public airwaves. Instead, it appears centered around returning Donald Trump to a platform that banned him after leading an insurrection.

And there seems to be an uncanny coincidence between Musk’s Twitter crusade and the collapse of Trump’s Truth Social (despite what the Musk media machine says).

Musk is a free speech “absolutist” when it comes to allowing Vladimir Putin’s propagandists access to Ukrainian minds, but not when it comes to media criticism of him or even his interactions with “those bastards” at the SEC. You never hear him decry the censorship inside Russia or economic “discrepancies” of South Africa, but you will see him tweet about woke culture.

This website and podcast are an excellent example of the type of content Musk, and his backers may find problematic about Twitter. Narativ was all about truth before it was fashionable – and well before Donald Trump launched Truth Social.

Narativ began live streaming over Twitter in 2019, taking advantage of a tech advancement that allowed for live independent broadcasting – television out of the proverbial reach of the masters who run American television.

We do the same show over on YouTube and Facebook, but algorithms being what they are, only a fraction of our Twitter audience shows up on YouTube, and barely anyone shows up on Facebook. 

We’re not alone, but we are among the genuine few who do it for the reasons we say. 

If Truth is an effective weapon against the forces of tyranny, and Twitter is the one place people can express that truth, wouldn’t that explain why Elon Musk wants to own the social network? 

Say you were cash poor, and the only money you could access was to borrow against your stock – would a barely profitable third-tier social network be what you buy? Wouldn’t you buy Facebook or Instagram – not Twitter?

Elon Musk isn’t just interested in a social media network. He wants to buy the only social network that hasn’t bolstered Donald Trump, and Q. Musk says he wants to save civilization, but what he’s doing is removing a significant roadblock to imposing authoritarian rule.  

Musk’s plan involves taking Twitter private – away from the scrutinizing eyes of the stock market and the SEC. 

He openly admits he wants to change Twitter’s algorithm so that GOP views would carry equal weight to Democrats (or vice versa) regardless of the accuracy of a position. By doing that, Musk would permanently entrench our current state of national polarization and elevate opinion over fact.

Like the Reagan Doctrine decreed that all news should cover both sides of an issue regardless of accuracy, Musk’s plan turns political discourse into popular sports and further away from fact and truth.

You might call it progress, but it’s retrograde. As Joni Mitchell lamented in Big Yellow Taxi (and later covered by the Counting Crows):

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot 
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot 
Don’t it always seem to go 
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone”

Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell

Twitter is not perfect by any stretch, but it is the one place you can still find truth and reason if you seek it.

If Elon Musk buys Twitter, he won’t improve it. He’ll kill it.

The post Elon Musk: The Twitter Killer appeared first on Narativ.