Elon Musk Gives Reasons For His Twitter Takeover Offer At The TED Conference

The world’s wealthiest person according to Bloomberg and Forbes; Elon Musk took the stage at a conference on Thursday and began sketching out a vision for Twitter if he succeeds in buying the company, while also lodging insults at government regulators and rival billionaire; Mark Zuckerberg.

The tech magnate’s appearance at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, was his first in public since he made a more than $40 billion takeover offer for San Francisco-based Twitter hours earlier.

Musk, who is also the CEO of automaker Tesla hammered Twitter for having rules he said were too restrictive of online speech.

“We want to have the perception and the reality that speech is as free as possible,” Musk said in an onstage interview conducted by Chris Anderson, the head of the conference.

“A good sign as to whether there’s free speech is: Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? And if that is the case, then we have free speech,” he said.

He said Twitter has become so important to the functioning of democracy that there’s “civilizational risk” if people lose trust in it.

“Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” he said.

Musk provided few details on how he would rewrite the rules and did not give specific examples of speech that he thought Twitter had unfairly restricted, but he sketched a vision of a Twitter that would be generally less moderated. “If in doubt, let the speech, let it exist,” he said.

At times he appeared to contradict himself, saying Twitter should “match” the laws of each country regarding speech — which could open the door to more hate speech on the service in the US — while also saying the company “needs human judgment” to evaluate the potentially violent speech.

He also said he might be wrong.

“I don’t know if I have all the answers here,” he said. “But I do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things and just be very cautious with permanent bans. Timeouts, I think, are better than sort of permanent bans.”

Twitter’s most famous band was on former President Donald Trump in early 2021, after the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters. By then, Trump’s critics had been asking Twitter for years to ban Trump, but the social media service had resisted, even rewriting part of its rulebook in 2018 so essentially world leaders like Trump could break some rules without losing their accounts.

Twitter once took a nearly absolutist view of online speech. In 2011, then-CEO Dick Costolo called the company “the free speech wing of the free-speech party,” but in recent years, after demands from users and advertisers, Twitter has confirmed its terms of service to crack down on targeted harassment, hateful imagery, and another mistreatment.

Musk said another top priority he would have for Twitter is eliminating spam and scam bots, an area in which the company already spends resources but has failed to stamp out the problem entirely.

He also said he would favor an edit button for altering tweets after a person sends them, at least for a short period. “I’m open to ideas,” he said.

As for a potential Twitter takeover, Musk said he did have sufficient assets to purchase the company.

Anderson, the interviewer, pressed Musk on whether it was a good idea for the world’s richest person to control an “incredibly important town square” such as Twitter.

Musk responded by noting that Zuckerberg has majority control of three of the world’s most widely used apps and that Zuckerberg could pass that ownership to his heirs.

“You’ve got Mark Zuckerberg owning Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, and with an issue ownership structure that will have Mark Zuckerberg the 14th still controlling those entities,” Musk said.

He added that he would open up Twitter’s “BlackBox algorithm” to public inspection to try to build public confidence in the platform.