Musk serious about making Twitter equivalent to an oligarch’s yacht staffed by crew of software geeks

Shorn of moderation, a ‘free speach’ Twitter could become a vector for those who want to destory it. But it could also turn into an empty echo chamber that would make a financial folly of a Musk takeover, says James Moore

Elon Musk: the world’s richest man is trying to buy Twitter (AP)

Elon Musk isn’t playing games when it comes to Twitter.

He has a history of using the micro-blogging site he wants to buy to float possible corporate actions. His infamous tweets about taking his carmaker Tesla private would be an example. It never happened. It just created a huge fuss. The tweets remain the subject of legal action on the part of disgruntled investors.

His designs on Twitter are on an entirely different plane. At the end of last week, the world’s richest man unveiled details of a $46.5bn (£36bn) financing package. This includes a large slug of his own money in addition to the inevitable debt, a substantial proportion of which is secured against his Tesla shares. The details were filed with America’s Security & Exchange Commission.

Musk has also revealed he is exploring a “tender” offer for the shares he doesn’t already own, with a typically irreverent tweet evoking the Elvis classic Love Me Tender.

When he first made his interest known, Twitter’s board set up a “poison pill”, allowing it to issue gobs of cheap shares to investors if Musk tried to increase the stake he’d built up without its permission. Putting the tender offer to Twitter investors is the antidote sitting on Musk’s medicine cabinet. If enough shareholders decide to accept, Twitter’s board would be stuffed.

Investors might well love Musk’s tender at the price. Twitter is very obviously a company with troubles. It has failed to innovate, it has missed opportunities, and it has looked leaden footed when compared to rivals. Its name recognition outstrips its financial performance. Its board is regularly criticised for dysfunction.

In Silicon Valley terms, it’s a slow horse, with apologies to Apple TV’s first-rate adaptation of Mick Herron’s novel of that name.

Such companies are typically catnip to deep-pocketed bidders with aggressive turnaround plans. Twitter the company might very well benefit from such an approach.

Instead it has found itself facing up to Musk, whose proposal is less about the financials than it is about his personal ideology.

The chances that Musk, who already runs Tesla and SpaceX, wins this one, would appear to be high. The proposal – at $54.20 a share – represents a 54 per cent premium over the day before he began investing in Twitter and a 38 per cent premium over the day before his build-up of a 9 per cent stake was publicly announced.

It raises the distinctly uncomfortable prospect of what, for all its woes, remains one of the world’s most influential media companies becoming a multi-billionaire’s plaything.

No self-respecting oligarch is without one of those grotesquely tasteless super-yachts, the Russian-owned examples of which have been getting seized around the world. Many like to have two or three of them at their disposal. But when you’re the richest man in the world, such baubles are clearly passé. Twitter seems destined to serve as Musk’s virtual boat, with a crew of software geeks serving him on deck.

Musk has talked about the network failing to fulfil its “societal imperative” to serve as a “platform for free speech around the world” under his ownership.

The purveyors of disinformation, extremists and Putinistas could be forgiven for chomping at the bit. Donald Trump, too, if this means he is restored to his favourite platform and gets to peddle his myths of a stolen election once more.

The debate about free speech frequently ignores the uncomfortable fact that there are an awful lot of people banging on about it who aren’t all that keen on it when it applies to them (and their businesses). These people are willing and able to use free speech for the subversion of democracy, which would ultimately lead to its untimely end.

Trump and his followers and enablers, and their lies about the 2020 US election being stolen, would be an example of that. Twitter helped spread their poison, and thus played a contributory role in the 6 January insurrection.

The congressional January 6 Committee has been providing evidence for just how close the world’s most powerful democracy came to being a failed democracy for months now. The reports emanating from it have made for deeply uncomfortable reading.

Anti-vaxx myths, again frequently propagated via social media, proved just as serious. People died as a result of them. Lots of people.

Some conservatives like to pretend that the purpose of moderation when it comes to sites like Twitter is to frustrate the dissemination of views liberals find distasteful. This is disingenuous to say the least, and deep down they know it.

In reality, when it is applied minimally and with due regard to fairness as it necessarily should be, it is there to defend democracy. But also to ensure people aren’t chased off by means of threats and other forms of cyberbullying, which is, regrettably, all too frequent.

Of course, it is entirely possible that an unmoderated Twitter owned by Musk leads to an exodus, leaving only the shouty, the aggressive and the unhinged to bellow into an echo chamber from which the rest of the world has departed. Musk’s involvement would then look like an expensive folly.

Thing is, his wealth is so dizzying that he could bear that without even really noticing.

If you can’t see the problem with that, with the can of worms that this quixotic takeover proposal has revealed and opened, then you probably never will.

Musk has said his proposal represents his best and final offer, which in theory sets a marker down for a potential “white knight”, enticed to come to the board’s rescue. In practice, this being Musk, who knows.

It’s not, anyway, altogether clear where a rival bid may come from given the antitrust concerns which haunt the most obvious interested parties in Silicon Valley.

Twitter may have to rest its hopes on convincing investors to stick with it and new CEO Parag Agrawal, who is well regarded internally but not exactly a face on Wall Street where it counts. Good luck with that.