Elon Musk Buys Twitter and Twitter Users Obviously Have Some Thoughts
It’s official: The world’s wealthiest person decided to use his vast fortune (and a lot of additional funds he had to come up with because money is fake and most of his is actually stocks and stuff) to buy Twitter.
Twitter’s board accepted Elon Musk’s offer/demand to buy the site for $44 billion Monday afternoon. No one knows exactly how this will change the site in either the short or long term, but you can tell a lot by who is celebrating this purchase. As a hint, there are a lot of Pepe the Frog avatars having their best day ever.
While Musk has said his goal was to “liberate” the site from censorship, that’s a pretty meaningless claim on its own. He wrote Monday, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” which is not what “free speech” really means but fine. Also pretty much no one believes that Musk will have no terms of service regarding content posting, in part because that would be a legal nightmare but also because Musk has shown us who he is, and it’s not a guy who can handle criticism of any kind.
I bet this comes in handy one day when we’re all being hilarious pic.twitter.com/iEjE1Q3S6B
— Jorts (and Jean) (@JortsTheCat) April 25, 2022
When billionaires like Elon Musk justify their motives by using “freedom,” beware. What they actually seek is freedom from accountability.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 24, 2022
A lot of people are talking about leaving the site (an understandable reaction!) while others are wondering how much worse the platform can actually get.
Older twitter users who have lived through geocities, web forums, livejournal, myspace, tumblr and twitter, finding out that it may be yet again time to change platforms pic.twitter.com/h5HAIrbwyn
— Dwuff™ 🥐☕✨🇿🇦 (@Dwuff) April 25, 2022
it is a shame that twitter is going to be bad unlike now when it is good
— Raphael Bob-Waksberg (@RaphaelBW) April 25, 2022
Mostly, people are just marveling at the outlandishly selfish, straight-up unethical decision to spend this much money on Twitter.
44 billion for this
— uncle baby billy (@quintabrunson) April 25, 2022
Men will literally spend billions on a social media platform instead of going to therapy.
— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 25, 2022
BREAKING: Man Makes Midlife Crisis Everybody’s Problem: https://t.co/0zOj3YlAfT pic.twitter.com/p1PvoKCz62
— Reductress (@Reductress) April 25, 2022
elon musk spending $43 billion to stop getting bullied on twitter when he could’ve simply been less annoying is insane
— first-mate prance (@bocxtop) April 25, 2022
That’s too much money for twitter. It’s just words. U can’t even eat it
— Vinny Thomas (@vinn_ayy) April 25, 2022
It’s hard to overstate the moral vacuum required to have $43 billion available to you and decide to use it to purchase a social media platform to ensure you’re allowed to shitpost without consequences instead of addressing poverty, climate change, or public health initiatives.
— Aaron Hoyland (@aaronhoyland) April 25, 2022
(image: Joshua Lott/Getty Images, Twitter)
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
