…or anyway the whole of Twitter. But why stop there?
by Edward Steen, Vienna, Good Friday, 2022
There is something uncanny about Elon Musk, 50, for example the name of his son X. Originally named X Æ A-12, “Æ” and “12” infringed California law for not being part of the English alphabet, his parents were forced to change his name to X AE A-XII, which is maybe more user-friendly easier in the school playground. Then last month, the SpaceX founder welcomed his first daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk into the world. She was accorded the nickname Y, which was no doubt easier to remember, given her older brother ended up being called X. All this and more in the peculiar Vanity Fair interview with their +/- musician mother, who calls herself Grimes, real name Claire Boucher.
When Your “Public Square” is a Private Company, Any Sulky Billionaire Can Buy It
None of this would really matter if it were not for the fact that the improbably rich Musk, termed “world’s wealthiest and noisiest man” in the article above, is now proposing to take over the entire Twitter company. The right-wing Washington Washington Examiner sees the move as possibly liberating social media like Facebook from tireseome constraints aka censorship of posting dangerous nonsense.
“Whether or not Twitter is worth the $43 billion that the Tesla CEO is supposedly willing to pay is neither here nor there,” comments the Literary Hub writer Andrew Keen. “It’s a silly man paying a silly price for a silly product. What matters is that in our social media age, Twitter—a place we go to try to emulate Elon Musk and make a lot of private noise—has massive value. You see, we don’t just go to social media Twitter to make noise. We go there to make a very contemporary kind of noise—a moral noise.”
Quite what it all means is far from clear, as the Washington Post indicates in an article about unrest among Twitter’s mostly liberal-minded 7,500 employees.
Twitter’s Indian-born chief executive Parag Agrawal, 37, held a companywide meeting to reassure his workforce of 7,500 full-time employees by arguing that one man could not change a culture, according to an anonymous insider-
The next days may show whether or not that is true.