WHY I WILL NEVER RETURN... End Of The Chinese Con: What's Really Going On With Musk & Twitter
Why Musk shouldn't be allowed to buy Twitter and no one should. A public square should be held in trust for the public.
With so many people asking me my thoughts on Twitter’s alleged purchase by Elon Musk, I thought I would answer. Don’t I believe in free speech?
No, I really don’t. Or if I do, I believe in free speech as it was once constituted. Free speech isn’t about the right to say anything you want; it’s about trying to use your speech to advance a shared understanding of the “good.”
So no, I will never allow American constitutional values to be subsumed by cynical plays by foreign actors. And yes, even if that means taking it on the chin for an unfair application of an injust policy. Some things are more important.
It has not been easy to endure some of the unfair and unkind and defamatory things said about me but in truth I feel about my critics the way Abraham Lincoln did.
I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.
Still, once again, I have tripped over a matter of public import and must go about setting it right or it will bedevil me in even the small hours of the night.
Once upon a time I was banned from Twitter for life for no reason particularly. In point of fact I was banned for criticizing Black Lives Matter and its tendency to divide us along racial and ethnic lines. The movements founder, Deray McKesson, used his close ties to Twitter’s executive team ban me for life. (This is, by the way, someone who believes that violent criminals shouldn’t spend that much time in jail.)
Here’s how it was recounted in the press.
In a Jan. 16 email, [Indian born] Tina Bhatnagar, the VP of user services, told Dorsey and other executives that the 2015 suspension of right-wing troll Chuck Johnson could provide a precedent for suspending [MILO] Yiannopoulos.
“Per our new enforcement policies, [Yiannopoulos] is consistently in violation but never of direct violence (which is what we perma suspend for). So if we can take the stance to debadge, then why can't we take the stance to perma-suspend?” Bhatnagar wrote. “We perma suspended Chuck Johnson even though it wasn't direct violent threats. It was just a call that the policy team made. He is finding loopholes in policy which is almost worse than the people who blatantly have violations.”
In a subsequent email, Gadde, the general counsel, also referenced a May 25, 2015, email from Twitter's then-CEO Dick Costolo to the company’s operations team, which suggested the decision to make Johnson’s suspension permanent was made at Costolo’s discretion. "As for Chuck Johnson - Dick made that decision," Gadde wrote before copying the text of Costolo's email to the chain. [Emphasis added].
“To be very clear, I don't want to find out we unsuspended this Chuck Johnson troll later on,” Costolo wrote. “That account is permanently suspended and nobody for no reason may reactivate it. Period. The press is reporting it as temporarily suspended. It is not temporarily suspended it is permanently suspended. I'm not sure why they're mistakenly reporting it as temporarily suspended but that's not the case here...don't let anybody unsuspend it.”
Internal Emails Show Twitter Struggled To Interpret Its Own Verification Rules While Hunting Trolls, by Charlie Warzel, December 19, 2017
“Don’t let anybody unsuspend it,” says Costolo, who now works for an NFT hawking company and whose closeness with the Chinese state was then and is now a serious concern. (Talent always finds its level.)
Alas, Costolo is not the only one with that problem as we shall soon see.
"Never bet against Elon Musk." — Peter Thiel.
It’s time to bet against Elon. He is to be the Generation X scapegoat for tech’s excesses. After all, Generation X owes much to globalization, by which I mean Sinification. Ours is a complicated age.
How interesting that it should be nearly seven years since I was banned from Twitter for life that such a deal should be proffered. I was, of course, wrongly banned and even Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo admitted that I broke no rules.
I am being asked by journalists and friends alike if I intend to return to Twitter. I’ve even spoken to a few people close to Musk, including Jared Birchall.
Let me be very clear: under no circumstances do I plan on returning to Twitter. Ever.
Twitter has done too much to harm the public and I will no longer participate in such projects that do harm to public life. If I do get my Twitter account back, I will tweet only one thing — “never tweet.” I have outgrown it and I think everyone else should too.
I think Jonathan Haidt’s arguments against social media are very well taken.
Unfortunately my refusal to participate in Twitter doesn’t mean Twitter disappears. I still have to live in the world that Twitter has created. Such a world is terrible for myself and those I love. I am routinely lied about on Twitter and find myself with little recourse. I sued, ineffectually, to correct the record and I lost. I suppose that’s the court system for you. I lost the court case though I did not lose the argument.
As much as I would love a careful steward of Twitter, it’s become clear to me that Elon Musk isn’t that person and perhaps such a person doesn't exist at all.
Perhaps we need to get over the idea that Twitter can be a good business and treat it as what it is — a digital public square. We don’t allow bill boards in national parks. So too should we not allow Twitter to be commercially captive.
We ultimately need the government to nationalize Twitter and to delink the advertising engine from the public square. After all, the agora of old long eschewed venal commercialization interests.
Could the government nationalize Twitter? I don’t know. The government has within its powers to take over things that are dangerous to the national interest and given Twitter’s longstanding use by foreign actors it certainly qualifies.
I think Bezos was right, in other words. Musk must pick a side.
Moreover Elon Musk’s attempts to purchase Twitter is a cynical attempt to cloak himself in the First Amendment as his Chinese-compromised companies collapse under both competition and national security concerns.
Such an end was altogether predictable if you studied Musk’s career closely. He is a product of China-backed Sequoia. (Thanks Michael Moritz, whose Chinese sycophancy leave nothing to the imagination!) His maternal grandfather ran the Chinese friendly Technocracy, which promptly got the family banned from Canada. His father got gifted a Zambian mine. (Zambia has lots of Chinese ties) His mother hangs out in Ukraine with weirdos who are also tied in with the Chinese. He gifts billions to a Russian-Jewish mobster for reasons unknown. He stars in Marvel films and in sitcoms. He parties with movie stars — some of whom he beds or weds — and he does drugs in Mexico or with muscle heads on bloviating podcasts.
No one asks why the man who wants to get us to Mars has so much time to host Saturday Night Live. Or to tweet at seemingly all hours.
And yes, while Musk says he would crack down on bots, he’s conspicuously quiet about the army of bots that elevate his every utterance. Could it be that they are part of what has been driving up the price of Tesla just as the fundamentals don’t support it?
No, this is not your grandfather’s tech titan. He’s something different. Musk is a construct. But whose? Well, it’s certainly not America’s. Indeed it oftentimes seems that the people who most often bray about being pro-America aren’t. (Marc Andreessen calls for everyone to build but then invests absurdly into Clubhouse. He’s fittingly running around buying up luxury real estate — the sort of thing you do when you run out of ideas or taste.)
Pay no attention to what the tech moguls say: focus only on what they do. Sure Andreessen has a lot of pro-American marketing but is it, you know, actually pro-American? I don’t mean to single out A16Z. They’re not the only ones who talks pro-American while doing deals with the Chinese.
Consider Musk’s alarming closeness with China on technical matters.
China has also allowed him to reopen his Shanghai factory but coincidentally only after he offered to take Twitter private. Was Musk being rewarded for the chaos? Were Musk to be successful in his takeover bid he would undoubtedly get his backing from Silver Lake and Goldman Sachs, which are themselves China compromised. (As of this writing it seems to be private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which has all kinds of weird ties to the Chinese.)
Could it be that Twitter has become interesting precisely as Facebook, itself backed by Chinese cash through venture capitalists, is now being taken over by the Anglo-American deep state? Why else is Brit Nick Clegg there?
Let’s consider former Facebook board member Peter Thiel’s assessment: “We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.”
Thiel, to his credit, always seemed reluctant about Facebook’s capacity to change the world for the better. He seemed downright sad that Facebook was the best that this generation can do.
Contrast that with the giddiness with which Musk has pursued Twitter. Musk’s decision to buy Twitter might suggest that he has no new ideas left and that the Chinese have altogether abandoned social media preferring instead — to go direct through Tik Tok.
The major platforms are going to have to have a form of know your customer laws — just as banks are required to and just as many nations now require for having an internet account. This is exactly what’s happening in China.
China's 854 million internet users are now required to use facial identification in order to apply for new internet or mobile services. The Chinese government announced in September that telecommunications companies will need to scan users' faces in order to verify their identities before they can access new services.
How soon before that comes to the West? Not long, I’d imagine. We want people to be responsible for the content they create online.
To be sure Musk has a point when it comes to the bot nets on Twitter and the advertising model is terribly broken on the Internet.
Of course I believe there’s something far more nefarious lurking behind Musk’s moves.
I suspect Musk is doing the bidding of the Chinese who yearn for another influence machine under their control. They, with their long plans, like chaotic Americans causing trouble at their behest.
They tried funding Parler (through the Chinese-Russian aligned Mercers) and they thought Truth Social might get it done but that seems doomed to fail.
Today Tesla is currently trading at over 200 times its earnings. Musk has raised Tesla prices while being denied rare earths from Chinese-controlled African mines which are now reviewing and canceling those Chinese contracts. Biden has pushed through executive orders and policies to protect America’s rare earths.
Musk is competing with Ford — a national champion making trucks — and with Bezos and Rivian. It’s hard to see how he can survive it.
So he runs off. How odd it is that Musk gets billions from government.
He raises more money for a tunnel company. Really.
If the Boring Company is the future, well consider me terribly bored. We wanted flying cars and we got tunnels and megalomaniacs buying Twitter.
Wasn’t the whole purpose of Musk to go to Mars? Isn’t that why his employees sacrifice so much to get there?
Who could blame Musk for escaping into Twitter?
There are real interesting things happen in Musk’s chosen field and yet he seems totally uninterested.
You’d think that Musk would be all over Aptera, say, which is currently raising at a $500 million valuation. To put that into perspective Tesla is currently valued at over $1 trillion.
Of course these are the sorts of big bets for which venture capital is famous.
We might also consider why Musk is slow to innovate beyond rockets.
Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson left working with Blue Origin because he was disappointed about how Bezos had pursued rockets only as the solution. He writes that at Blue Origin “the bulk of my efforts were devoted to investigating possible alternatives to conventional rockets as ways of getting into space.”
Enter SpinLaunch.
Jonathan Yaney, SpinLaunch’s founder, makes mention of Bolonkin’s classic, Non-Rocket Space Launch and Flight.
SpaceX is currently valued at $100 billion. SpinLaunch is valued at under $240 million if its next round of financing comes through.
All told SpinLaunch will need about $300 million in financing to build their high end launch vehicle to spend things up into space. That’s roughly $165 million less than the $465 million low interest loan Tesla got from the Department of Energy in 2010 and there’s been a lot of inflation since then.
To put that in perspective SpaceX could buy SpinLaunch.
So why hasn’t SpaceX bought it? If it is a limitation on the physics, what limitation is that? Doesn’t SpaceX have an obligation to tell us?
Those of us in the tech world have been allowed to be disruptive and to get wealthy precisely because the public believes what we do actually helps them in the final analysis.
If we are just investing in consumer internet or in real estate tech which ultimately makes their lives harder, their support for us will diminish. And frankly it should.
We will have failed to seize the day and take to the frontier.
What then should be done about Twitter?
Over the years I’ve become more or less convinced that Twitter needs to be nationalized and not just in the stealth way that happens when former government officials join your board. I mean, honest to God taken over
We should have the Post Office take over Twitter. Maybe then we will have actual accountability — by Americans, for Americans.
Yes, I believe in the Post Man. And I believe in the sort of country which produces him and keeps him alive.
The Post Man can sort it out. He always has always carried something more powerful than mere letters. He symbolizes the will of a nation to come together — something we desperately need now more than ever.
