Musk probably bought Twitter for the same reason billionaires throughout history have become press barons: to try to control the conversation
Twitter is free. You can go on there and type your embarrassing little thoughts for the whole world to see any time you like. Millions of us have been doing this for years. Revealing to everyone how dumb your inner thoughts are may cost you your reputation, sure, but it won’t cost you any money. Not even if you’re the richest man in the country.
So why spend $44bn to buy it? That’s a fair piece of change, even to someone whose net worth hovers above $200bn. It’s also much more than the company is actually worth, as evidenced by Elon Musk’s desperate attempt to get out of the deal almost as soon as he had gotten irretrievably into it. The price is too high to be a pure lifestyle purchase – if you want a media property just for the social cachet and party invitations, it can be had much cheaper. Fellow villainous mega-billionaire space tourist Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a mere $250m, less than 1% of what Musk just paid for a cacophonous global collection of weird, hollering self-promotion.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer at In These Times
