> Buying the company and taking it private will give him the ability to make those hard choices and try to make a social media company that is positive for humanity.
If that's the goal, why not simply found another social media company built around those values?
Surely he has the means to attract tech talent to do it, the means/message to attract users to a new platform, and presumably if he knows what's bad about Twitter and how to subtract it and make it good, he could do this greenfield.
This would result in increased platform diversity, too. And I'll bet you it's cheaper.
Imagine if Musk had tried to buy a big three automaker in order to make electric cars happen.
Because this isn't really about building a neat social network, it's about power.
People have tried to do what you said. Let's make a Twitter that's not controlled by the hard left! The result was Twitter's ideological allies at tech firms immediately banned them from every platform they controlled, and other allies ganged up to hack and destroy them.
You cannot start a Twitter competitor today, it's impossible, because:
1. The sort of people who found companies tend to be pro-free speech because their economic survival depends on having risky but correct ideas, and that naturally leads to a sympathy for free speech.
2. The sort of people who hate free speech are obsessed with Twitter/tweeting platforms specifically.
3. They are exceptionally aggressive. They will do anything, including damaging their own companies and even breaking the law in order to stop any other platform from becoming popular. They've managed to take over tech firms to a sufficient extent that they will destroy any attempts to replace Twitter, which they see as a key pivot point in their power over society.
The obvious solution: buy Twitter and fix it. It's too big to ban. This also has the major benefit of really, really upsetting Musk's ideological enemies. They'd hate him anyway and many are in powerful positions in politics and the media. Even the thought of losing Twitter to Musk has very conspicuously driven them into a frenzy in recent days, and such frenzies discredit them in the eyes of the general public, thus weakening their ability to move against Musk.
> If that's the goal, why not simply found another social media company built around those values?
Twitter is one of the few social networks that actually has a network. A lot of social media failed because the cold start problem is a very hard problem to solve at this point in the game. Elon probably knows it and I would bet that this is why he is looking to buy an established social network rather than creating a new one.
> Imagine if Musk had tried to buy a big three automaker in order to make electric cars happen.
Bad analogy. Social media platforms are natural monopolies. The utility of a car doesn't grow with how many other people own that model. By contrast, Twitter's utility is basically just a function of the fact that all the relevant players use it.
If this was the case, Facebook wouldn't have needed to buy Instagram and Whatsapp. Or hell, there wouldn't have been FB because MySpace would have been king forever.
Network effects are real and they can help sustain engagement and mindshare but given how easy it is to move fluidly between multiple forums (social or no), the next competing platform is one compelling reason for engagement away.
If that's the goal, why not simply found another social media company built around those values?
Surely he has the means to attract tech talent to do it, the means/message to attract users to a new platform, and presumably if he knows what's bad about Twitter and how to subtract it and make it good, he could do this greenfield.
This would result in increased platform diversity, too. And I'll bet you it's cheaper.
Imagine if Musk had tried to buy a big three automaker in order to make electric cars happen.