Elon Musk can now shape the direction of Twitter – where might that lead?

It will be fascinating to see how Elon Musk deploys his genius towards social media, writes Hamish McRae

US Elon Musk Twitter (AP)

When Elon Musk tweets the markets move – and massively so when he revealed he had bought 9.2 per cent of Twitter.

When the world’s richest person buys nearly 10 per cent of a social media giant, you sit up. This is, I suggest, one of those situations where you learn more from what people do than what they say – or tweet. Elon Musk has come under fire from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for his market-moving tweets, action that he has pushed back against. We have to wait and see what happens.

The SEC was founded in 1933 to police the financial markets in the wake of the 1929 share crash, and since then it has by and large done a pretty good job. This deal in Twitter shares may lead to a further spat with the SEC, for he seems to have filed details of the purchase a few days late.

But to focus on this misses the really big point. As Twitter’s largest shareholder, Musk now has an opportunity to shape the direction of the social media world. Where might that lead?

I have no special insight into his mind, having only met him once, at a dinner in London – though I should report that he was deeply courteous, dealing with a chap that tried to join our table and make a pitch to him with patience and grace. But you don’t become the richest person in the world if you don’t have special qualities, and the fascinating thing will be to see how he deploys those.

He has utterly transformed the global motor industry, starting from a tiny base, and for the better. The switch from the internal combustion engine to the electric motor would eventually have happened, but it would have taken place at least a decade later, maybe longer.

Now he has a much larger platform from which to start transforming the social media business, if that is what he wishes to do. But in what direction? The trouble with the whole debate about the future of social media is that there is so much going on that it is hard to pick out what really matters among the wall of sound that the industry generates. There are lots of interesting issues of detail, including whether Twitter should have an edit button. Users have been asked to vote.

There are also huge issues of principle, notably the extent to which content should be policed. Musk has made his own stance clear, tweeting that “free speech is essential of a functioning democracy” and polling his followers as to whether Twitter adhered to this principle. Some 70 per cent thought it did not.

This gets into the issue of the right to say (or tweet) something harmful, including something that harms democracy. That threat was well described by Barack Obama. In an interview in The Atlantic in 2020 he said: “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”

That may be too gloomy, for democracy has always been a raucous, chaotic, messy system of governance. Social media is just one more complicating element to that. But whatever one’s view on the free speech/right to say something harmful debate, most people would acknowledge that the marketplace of ideas could function better. That is the challenge that faces social media, and that is where Musk could have a most important role. He likes breaking rules, sure, but he also understands markets. More than that, he understands the human instinct for endeavour, witness his vision for a crewed mission to Mars by 2029.

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We tend to forget, because it is so ubiquitous, that social media is actually very new. Facebook was launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006. The Wright brothers made their first flight in 1903. So social media is where the aircraft was in the 1920s, when society was still struggling to come to terms with the transformation that aircraft had brought to war and would bring to commercial travel in the years ahead.

We are struggling to understand and channel social media in a way than helps humankind – that makes the marketplace of ideas function better.

And that is where Musk can help. We should all hope he chooses to do so.