Everything you wanted to know about Elon Musk and Twitter (but didn’t want to ask)

So you want to know what’s going on with Elon Musk and Twitter, but you thought maybe it’s a little too late to ask your tech-obsessed buddies for the low-down. You’ve come to the right place.

Last month, in perhaps the year’s biggest tech news story yet, Elon Musk announced his intent to buy Twitter for $44 billion. But like everything that the Tesla and SpaceX exec touches, it turned to chaos. Now, the relationship between Elon Musk and Twitter has become the greatest “will-they-or-won’t-they” of our time (… okay, maybe more like this month).

Without further ado… Let’s start at the basics.

Who is Elon Musk? The electric car guy?

I know I’ve heard this guy’s name a lot, but… who is he exactly?

You sweet summer child. Elon Musk is a South African-born entrepreneur best known for serving as CEO of Tesla (electric car company), SpaceX (let’s go to Mars?) and The Boring Company (something to do with tunnels, idk, don’t worry about it). Early in his career, he founded X.com, a startup that was acquired by the company that became PayPal. He is also the richest man in the world.

Oh right, he’s the one who had children with Grimes, and they named their kids weird things! Is Grimes ok? “Visions” is a good album.

Yes, Elon Musk dated the Canadian electronic musician Grimes for several years, and they had two children named X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl. They are no longer dating.

It seems like Elon Musk is a pretty controversial figure. Is it just because he’s super rich?

That’s part of it. But as TechCrunch’s Taylor Hatmaker wrote, he “generally conducts himself like a person who doesn’t give a single shit about the literally incomprehensible power differential between himself and basically every other person on the planet.” He has peddled vaccine skepticism to his 92.8 million Twitter followers and said that panic around COVID-19 was “dumb,” his companies have been routinely cited for union-busting, poor working conditions, coverups of worker injuries and racist treatment, and he often uses his Twitter to make racist, transphobic jokes. He also allegedly paid an employee $250,000 to sign an NDA to keep her quiet after he sexually harassed her. Overall, he’s pretty insufferable.

Why does Elon Musk want to buy Twitter?

He’s already the CEO of so many companies, and he has more money than anyone else in the world — why buy Twitter?

At first, Musk flirted with the idea of starting his own social media platform. I regret my past headline choices, but I’ll admit, I didn’t think he would actually offer Twitter $44 billion to buy their platform instead of building one from scratch. Oh, how naive I was.

Before he made the offer, he bought a 9.2% stake in the company, was offered a board seat, declined the board seat… a lot of silly shenanigans.

Musk calls Twitter the “town square” of the internet, but he doesn’t like how it’s run.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said. He has declared that his definition of “free speech” is “simply that which matches the law.” This is similar to the approach taken by fringe social networks like Parler and Truth Social, Trump’s new platform. He declared that if people want the law to be different, they can simply just get the government to change it, a shockingly stupid statement from someone who doesn’t understand how hard it is to pass legislation, or just… generally how the world works.

But Twitter’s existing platform guidelines aren’t that stringent. Beyond prohibiting illegal activity, Twitter bans hateful conduct (attacking or threatening people based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, etc.), depictions of graphic violence, promotion of suicide or self-harm, etc. The platform doesn’t even censor pornographic content, so long as it doesn’t appear in a live video or a profile header.

By the way, isn’t a Saudi Arabian prince’s sovereign wealth fund helping finance the Twitter deal? Saudi Arabia enforces serious restrictions on speech and the media, so doesn’t that seem weird? I thought Musk was really into free speech.

Yeah.

So why does Elon Musk think that Twitter is censoring people, anyway?

Elon Musk gets away with tweeting things like… comparing Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler, comparing Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to Joseph Stalin, saying that gender pronouns “suck” … Yet he’s still concerned that free speech isn’t possible on Twitter (or is he just concerned that people hold him accountable when he says offensive shit?).

Shortly before Musk vocalized his interest in buying Twitter, the conservative satire site the Babylon Bee was suspended from Twitter for making a hateful, transphobic post about a public official. According to Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, who is also a director at Parler, Musk told him that he “might need to buy Twitter” to protect free speech.

How does the SEC figure into all of this?

The SEC keeps an eye on what the business mogul says on his account. The SEC tries to keep stock trading as fair as possible — that’s why things like insider trading are illegal, AKA, when someone makes investment decisions based on information about a company that isn’t public.

In 2018, Musk tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share (yes, that number is intentional), which of course, impacted the company’s stock. In reality, the potential buyout wasn’t close to going through (to this day, Tesla is still a public company). So, both Musk and Tesla had to pay a $20 million penalty, and Musk stepped down from the board.

Anyway, Elon Musk has now had a “Twitter sitter” for about 4 years, as part of his 2018 deal with the SEC. Honestly, it’s pretty funny that he has a “Twitter sitter.” But it’s not funny that he can impact the stock market (and thus, real people’s finances) by tweeting whatever crosses his mind. Even if he has to be careful when tweeting about Tesla, that doesn’t mean that his posts don’t still impact the market.

Musk is also currently being probed by the SEC because when he first purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter, he failed to file a form that is required when purchasing over 5% of a company’s shares. Though the public learned of this news on April 4, Musk actually surpassed 5% ownership on March 14, and per SEC rules, he should’ve disclosed that within ten days (he didn’t). Daniel Taylor, a University of Pennsylvania accounting professor, told the Wall Street Journal that this failure to disclose his purchase likely saved Musk more than $143 million.

What other plans does he have for Twitter?

At a TED event the day he announced his $44 billion bid, Musk said he wants to make Twitter’s algorithm and code open source. That means that anyone would be able to access the publicly-available code that powers Twitter and iterate on it.

Several U.S. legislators have called for greater transparency around social media algorithms, especially in the wake of former Facebook employee Frances Haugen’s document leaks, which show that Facebook favors content that’s more likely to incite anger. But, like most things in life, there’s more nuance there. While greater transparency might give users more agency over what content they’re served, there are also security issues that open-sourcing Twitter’s code and algorithm might pose. More on that from one of our great security reporters, Carly Page, here.

At the same event, Musk stated: “The top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. They’re making the product much worse. If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam … .”

To combat bot spam, he proposed “authenticating all humans.” While these strategies can help mitigate spam, they can also make it more difficult for marginalized people to speak out. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post, “Pseudonymity and anonymity are essential to protecting users who may have opinions, identities, or interests that do not align with those in power. For example, policies that require real names on Facebook have been used to push out Native Americans; people using traditional Irish, Indonesian, and Scottish names; Catholic clergy; transgender people; drag queens; and sex workers. Political dissidents may be in grave danger if those in power are able to discover their true identities.”

Still, bots have been Musk’s hill to die on. More on that in our next section…

Is Elon Musk really buying Twitter though? Like, really really?

I heard that the deal is on hold because of bots. What does that mean?

Perhaps our valiant protagonist has finally realized that spending $44 billion on a social platform is more trouble than it’s worth. He’s been very concerned about bots on the platform for a while, as evidenced by his fantasy of verifying all humans on Twitter (it’s as if he doesn’t follow any very good bots).

Twitter estimates that bots make up less than 5% of accounts on the site, but “lame duck” CEO Parag Agrawal said that he doesn’t think this calculation could be verified externally, since it requires use of private company data. Musk replied with a poop emoji.