As a non-peruser of Twitter – email is time-waster enough – I see what the twits are saying only when some blog or news story calls their whines to my attention. Today I read that Elon Musk is offering to buy the 90.8 percent of Twitter Inc. shares that he doesn’t already own. Online commentary seethes with progressive horror and conservative delight. The Wall Street Journal suggests that both are getting excited about nothing much:
Twitter closed at $45.08, down 1.7%. Such performance is almost unheard-of after a takeover offer and indicates skepticism that a deal would be consummated. . . .
Given how the stock is trading, “the market is pricing in a higher likelihood that the deal is rejected than accepted,” said Victoria Scholar, head of investment at Interactive Investor.
When I first saw news of the Musk bid, it called up memories of 1985, when Ted Turner stirred right wing hearts by bidding to take over CBS. The mogul winked and nodded his sympathy with complaints that the mass media were monochromatically liberal, as of course they were, and gave the impression that he would do what Fox News did a decade later. Maybe he was sincere on some level, but it’s obvious now that the cause of fair-and-balanced news coverage lost nothing when he gave up his efforts.
The Turner parallel is highly imperfect in one respect: Elon Musk is no Mr. Jane Fonda, and he hasn’t spent his adult life parroting progressive clichés. There’s no reason to suspect that he sails under a false Free Speech flag. Still, his entrepreneurial personality is split. Tesla’s business model depends on government mandates and subsidies, without which no one but poseurs would purchase electric vehicles. SpaceX, quite the opposite of Tesla, competes with the government. So Mr. Musk is part Ayn Rand’s James Taggart and part Robert Heinlein’s D. D. Harriman. How those two souls inhabit the same body is beyond my comprehension.
In another, more important way, though, Turner vs. CBS and Musk vs. Twitter are the same story and are likely to have the same ending. After making the rote, SEC-compliant pledge to give due consideration to Musk’s offer, Twitter’s management turned immediately to formulating a “poison pill” issuance of new shares at discounted prices, thus increasing the cost and difficulty of purchasing a controlling interest. CBS deployed a different tactic to the same end against Turner. If the poison pill doesn’t prove lethal, Twitter will no doubt erect other obstacles, just as CBS did. Already there are reports that the SEC and the Justice Department have begun a joint investigation of Tesla. The timing must be sheer coincidence.
Suppose, though, that Musk does prevail, obtains at least one share more than 50 percent and installs his own board of directors and management personnel. That brings us to the final, unsurmountable obstacle to the dream of an unbiased Twitter. Parag Agrawal and the other Twitter executives relish their company’s role in suppressing “unsafe” facts and opinions, but they aren’t the ones who execute the coverup campaigns. That is the work of Twitter’s several thousand employees, among whom fairness to conservative ideas is regarded as a form of racism, sexism, transphobia, and so on down the current list of devil-terms. Today’s all-hands meeting for the Twitter work force echoed with threats of resignations, but the real impediment to a Musk-led makeover is the likelihood that few of the threats would be carried out. Instead of abandoning lucrative jobs, the workers will stay on and keep doing what they were doing before. What will Elon Musk and the managers he brings in do about it? Do they have time to watch laptop screen of every content moderator and unpack the biases built into a multitude of tweet-screening algorithms? If they take the initiative against anti-conservative censorship, can they afford the distraction of lawsuits by every discharged employee and a parade of pathetic news stories about single mothers who found positions at Twitter and have been fired for failing to toe the new owner’s line?
No matter who owns Twitter, it will go on as before, unless the new team takes the rash (“risky” is too tame an adjective) step of dismantling the enterprise and rebuilding it from the ground up. Not even Elon Musk feels rich enough, I expect, to put 40 billion dollars on the double-zero of a virtual roulette wheel.
The media’s ideological lockstep is hardly a new problem. About a decade ago, UCLA professor Tim Groseclose documented quite convincingly “How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind”, concluding that, “if we could magically eliminate media bias”, the country’s political midpoint would balance on states like Kansas, Texas and South Dakota. Twitter and its compeers have pushed public opinion to the left of that, but look at how much labor they have expended without gaining any sort of clear triumph. That the Left needs such strong tailwinds to produce a “fifty-fifty nation” is evidence of how limited its appeal truly is. No wonder it turns increasingly to coercion rather than consent.
Comments