"Previously, when people have tried to make a reasonable system, they've found that…that they would get some portion of the way and they would conclude that success was not one of the possible outcomes. And…and in government programs, of course…the program would still continue for quite some time…" -Elon Musk

Free speech is a lot of things. Many of them are most easily observed by its negation: freedom of agency and its many forms chief among them. Free speech is also a prerequisite to many common actions taken in the investigation of crime, and defense against totalitarianism and other tyranny. What does Elon's purchase of Twitter have to do with bringing the criminals who fostered authoritarianism (that will likely lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions or even billions of people thrust into poverty, about to take the brunt of a global famine) to justice? We'll come back to that…

Understand that I'm neither an Elon fanboy, nor a hater. In general, I loath parasocial relationships and ignore celebrities except insofar as the information is important to understanding something I'm trying to understand. There are exceptions like finding a way to get my wife into Futurama Studios to spend the day with the writers, actors, animators, and producers, but bidding at a charity auction for a surprise birthday present to an incredible wife is the exception to celebrity engagement, not the rule.

Back to Twitter…

I have not done a deep dive on Elon's backstory, the proportion of his wealth due to government project subsidy, allegations that drugs have been sold out of the Gigafactory, or whether his baby momma is actually a Martian luring him to the dusty Red Planet. Let us agree for the moment to go beyond…whatever truth there is or isn't in these stories?

Let's not bother to dwell on these more or less plausible tales for the moment. We have bigger [redacted] to [redacted].

Elon Musk @elonmusk

@pmarca Extremely concerning. Who is pushing this censorship/deplatforming? Very shadowy.

Elon's Twitter is a Done Deal

"It [Mars] is a fixer upper of a planet…eventually you could transform Mars into an Earth-like planet…you'd just have to warm it up…There's a fast way and a slow way…The fast way is drop thermonuclear weapons over the polls." -Elon Musk

Buying Twitter is the fast way to…what exactly?

While $44 billion sounds like a lot of money, it may be less than Tesla's profit margin over the next four years alone, a fraction of Elon's net worth, and is notably less than the perceived market value of LGBTQCIA sensitivity training for seven-year-olds.

Speaking of magical kingdoms, do not be fooled by Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's "opposition" to Musk's offer. After all, the House of Saad's most notorious investor in Western corporate paper increased his stake in Twitter prior to Elon's purchase.

الوليد بن طلال @Alwaleed_Talal

I don't believe that the proposed offer by @elonmusk ($54.20) comes close to the intrinsic value of @Twitter given its growth prospects. Being one of the largest & long-term shareholders of Twitter, @Kingdom_KHC & I reject this offer.

الوليد بن طلال @Alwaleed_Talal

أتممت أنا وشركة المملكة رفع ملكيتنا في شركة #twitter الى ٥،٢٪ لتصل القيمة السوقية لملكيتنا لأكثر من ٣،٧٥ مليار ريال http://t.co/lN6gmEDFIl

Might as well make an extra few bucks before losing such a valuable asset? If you can't smell the profit motivation, you might have COVID.

Alex Barredo 📉 @somospostpc

@elonmusk @Alwaleed_Talal @Twitter @Kingdom_KHC Hey Elon, don’t forget about this doozy

nytimes.comFormer Twitter Employees Charged With Spying for Saudi Arabia (Published 2019)The Justice Department’s charges raised questions about the security of technology companies.

Prince bin Talal works Western media like few outlanders possibly could. While most of the early reporting specific to bin Talal seems to have been scrubbed from the internet (not all media is quite so savvy as to cover those tracks), you may recall that major Western media reported the he was detained and tortured during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's "anti-corruption crackdown" or "power consolidation" or whatever actually went down in 2017.

However, after a few days bin Talal emerged and reported simply that he was amicably detained during the process. I guess I was right that we shouldn't be trusting CNN about the story (or anything else).

As an aside, part of MBS's investigative process included looking into the Saudi government's public health response to MERS.

Al-Arabiya reported that the committee is looking into devastating and deadly floods that overwhelmed parts of the city of Jiddah in 2009 and is investigating the Saudi government's response to the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus that has killed several hundred people in the past few years.

I wonder if chiropractor Bryan Ardis has considered a link between SARSnake venom and the Saudi "Corona Prince" MBS? Never mind…attention economics is a thing worth respecting, even when others do not.

If I recall correctly, Prince bin Talal was Twitter's largest investor prior to the crackdown. I'm not sure what to think of that, but I'm noodling it over. On the one hand, bin Talal helped secure Elon's SpaceX financing after Obama canceled the space shuttle era, which was a critical piece of SpaceX's economic feedback loop. For a while that put Russia in the driver's seat of manned space flights. More recently, Elon is thumbing his nose at the Russian program while eating its lunch.

Do I need to say it? There's no crying in baseball. THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!

Prince bin Talal also recently sold half his stake in Four Seasons Hotels to Bill Gates. Until November, the pair owned equal amounts of a 95% stake in the hotel and resort company. The pair had previously co-invested in a lab-growing meat startup. Between faux-beef and using Twitter as a personal spy agency, it's likely the case that bin Talal is a clear enemy of the American people. Moving on…

There is a substantial list of reasons why it's easier for Elon to purchase Twitter than for other billionaires, aside from the fact that few billionaires have $44 billion on hand or credit. So, global politics aside, we might just chalk this up as a shrewd business investment. I mean…we should give Elon some credit for knowing how and where money can be made, right?

Is 15 years…old for a social media company? Or…a company? Does the new car smell begin to fade? Does it stop feeling sexy to wear a shirt with the company logo? Being right once can make some people overconfident, so I'll simply point out some facts about the world's ten most valuable companies by market cap:

Apple is 45 years old and was conceived before I was.
Saudi Aramco is 88 years old and was conceived before my parents were.
Microsoft turned 47 after surviving a divorce between Melinda and a rumored-to-be-pregnant Bill.
Alphabet is the restructured organization of a 23 year old Google.
Amazon is 27 and boomed after the last economic recession.
Tesla is 18 and also ELON'S LARGEST COMPANY, YOU ABSOLUTE MORON.
Berkshire Hathaway predates the Cambrian Period, according to fact checkers.
Facebook is 18 and still manages to find out what humans keep on their shelves.
TMSC is 35 and hasn't forgotten how to make computer chips in an era where demand outstrips supply.
NVIDIA is 29 and helps thousands of people read this newsletter.

As somebody who has made a few hundred thousand dollars out of virtual dust identifying and trading through PNDs with nearly 100% success, I never for a moment considered that possibility. If you did, and became married to it, you might need deprogramming, perhaps rehab, and probably also an honest economics textbook. You may also want to consider the wisdom of following connections like bin Talal that are thrown directly into your face like a cream pie during trading hours.

Whole Mars Catalog @WholeMarsBlog

Tesla Advertising Spend 2017 — $0 2018 — $0 2019 — $0 2020 — $0 2021 — $0 2022 — $44 billion

I discussed that reality and a bit more a few hours ago with my friends Tommy Carrigan and "Doctor Misses Jessica Rose." By embracing free speech, Twitter could easily win back many millions of users who have fled to Gettr, Gab, Parlor, Twetch, Truth Social, and the approximately 17.3 other social media platforms positioning themselves to take Twitter ejectees or their primary follows. As Mark Changizi points out, Twitter was the first digital public square. There is first mover advantage, and organized mass movement is hard. It's discontiguous and dirty. It also leaves behind valuable data that is currently rotting. Elon just unleashed a substantial portion of the value of that rotting data while inviting back millions of users. If you can't hear the money flowing back toward Twitter, you're either hearing impaired or standing too close to screaming Woke NPCs.

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson

Live shot of Twitter HQ at this very moment

I haven't heard back from fact checkers, but I'm fairly certain those are the people who find Donald Trump's chatter scarier to "promote" than the Taliban's.

We also discussed the game theoretic value added due to free speech principles, and the potential for investigation into what went wrong during the pandemic, a point I'll come back to…

Regardless of your feelings about Elon, he does bait out the crazy. Either that or 40% of everyone in the Westernsphere is in on the same joke, and I'm not one of them. So be it. I mean…that would be spectacular. My ego can take it.

Michael Tracey @mtracey

Dark days ahead. There is only one man who should be celebrating Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter -- Vladimir Putin. My latest in the New York Times:

One way or another, that right there is value added that you cannot get on cable television, which may or may not still exist as of this writing. I haven't checked. Imagining the intersection of Woke and Ecowarriors make sense of all this makes my giggles have their own fits of laughter.

What I can piece together is that Putin is responsible for saving the Earth from climate change through automobiles that run on white power, and Elon is the autistic Agent of Change whose final form was not possible without the contentious purchase of Twitter. Please correct my permutation of the narrative soup after a stir.

My entire Reality Show Politics series is now broken because reality looks even more entertaining than anything Hollywood, Putin, the DoD, the WEF, or intelligence agencies could possibly stage, even with the help of extraterrestrials.

I'll find a way to cope. Moving on…

Freakout Mode on Overdrive

"We're trying to confuse the aliens as much as possible." -Elon Musk

I know that most people did not see the ACLU and Amnesty International going full-Stalin, but it was the inevitable progression. Go back and stand calmly in the middle of a university in the mid-90s. Take a deep breath and listen. You'll know.

Reuters @Reuters

Human rights groups including the ACLU and Amnesty International raised concerns about hate speech on Twitter and the power that Elon Musk, a self-described 'free speech absolutist,' would have after his acquisition reut.rs/3rPCkCh

But after the Trump years, can we be certain that Elon isn't just a trap that off-the-rails organizations like the ACLU promote to those outside The Party by hating on? I can ask that question, but I can't answer it, so I'll move on…

Elon's detractors have lists. As I've said, I haven't done a deep dive. But the point is that they have lists. In multiple parts.

You're going to see every one of these links dropped on Twitter with mimetic seizures of adrenilized virtue signaling ratioed into timestamped proof of hatred. Expect some cryptocurrency entrepreneur to capitalize on a Proof of Hatred protocol on that basis. If you're not certain whether I'm joking, understand that I'm not certain, either.

Elon dared to wade into the all-important pronoun debate, which is an instant boundary that signals whether you'd be put up against the wall when the revolution comes. Do you think she'd shoot him? I'm honestly not sure either way.

The primary question is whether it will be entertaining to watch the resulting interplay. Will it include calling out the author of the above headline for assuming pronouns in the headline? We're far enough beyond irony that I can't ask that question as a joke. It's actually not funny to see how quickly this achieves infinite descent.

Maybe it is at first, before we recognize the horror that it represents, but this is quite literally society breaking itself. This is the result of multiple generations of willful mismanagement of education, and encouragement of poor parenting, and possibly those things on top of chemical poisoning of our food, water, and environments on several levels.

But at this point it's a full blown ideological movement. The rules allow any level of accusation, ultimately, and at any time. Something is in the water, whether literally or figuratively, and we have to figure out what's going on with this level of shared mental illness.

Do you think this is the reason Twitter employees are freaking out over Elon's buyout? Or might criminal activity have anything to do with it? We'll talk about that more…

And, of course, there is no way to talk about culture war on Twitter without talking about Libs of Tiktok. Again, it's funny until it's not. Somebody lost more than an eye somewhere. This is a mirror for reflection, which is a useful tool for breaking narcissism (which can be entertaining). But if we're experiencing narcissism grown in laboratory conditions, stoked by poisons before education, trained into tech skills, we have an extremely sad (horrific) challenge for the world's greatest engineer.

Is he up to the task?

Meanwhile, Trump says he isn't returning to Twitter, so whatever hilarity will ensue has a strict ceiling.

Principles of Decentralized Power

"Here we are on top of our giant ball of liquid oxygen. They say SpaceX has big balls and…it's true." -Elon Musk

One of the things I give Elon credit for, aside from producing electric cars that really are sensationally smooth to operate (and more affordable after fuel savings if you don't hog the rapid charging stations), is pushing back against the tyranny of intellectual property. I consider intellectual property to be one of the pillars of modern serfdom. I plan to expand on that statement more in a future article. It is noteworthy that Elon produces open source technology. On a business level, he dares you to beat him at the level of organized engineering, casting aside certain artificial monopoly powers.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

🚀💫♥️ Yesss!!! ♥️💫🚀

I think that Bitcoin has the best chance (by far) out of the cryptocurrency world to be its own pillar of a vibrant future of ample freedom. Elon has taken steps toward a "Bitcoin standard" with Tesla. That's been profitable for him.

There is much more I could say about Bitcoin, crypto Twitter, and Elon, but I'll save it for future articles.

Bitcoin got a price bump on the back of the news of Elon's purchase.

Of course, price is fleeting. Investment is everything. Do you wonder whether or when cryptocurrency will be engineered into the Twitter experience? I do, and it's one of the aspects of Elon's purchase of Twitter that I find most universally positive.

There is Lots for Elon to Unpack

"Everything not saved will be lost." -Ancient Nintendo Wisdom

Elon's verbal stance on free speech absolutism is one thing, but Twitter operates in nations that prohibit speech in many forms. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, also a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, either compromised or lost control of the process.

JackReacher @DCjusticeseeker

Jack Dorsey says blocking the NY Post's Hunter Biden laptop story was a 'total mistake' — but he won't say who made the error…🙄 nypost.com/2021/03/25/dor… via @nypost

nypost.comJack Dorsey says blocking Post’s Hunter Biden story was ‘total mistake’ — but won’t say who made itTwitter doesn’t have a “censoring department” that blocked The Post from tweeting last fall, CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday — but he wouldn’t reveal who was responsible for the blunder. At a congres…

And as POTUS Obama demonstrates, you can parade around the terminology of "free speech absolutism" while working to silence opposition.

Obama said major social media companies need to play a more significant role in suppressing content.
“The bigger issue is what content these platforms promote,” Obama said. “Algorithms have evolved to the point where nobody on the outside of these companies can accurately predict what they’ll do, unless they’re really sophisticated and spend a lot of time tracking it. And sometimes, even the people who build them aren’t sure.”

It's like words don't mean anything to some people. But is he playing to his base, or leading it?

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

In the last 2 weeks, both Obama and Hillary surveyed the extreme censorship regime imposed on the internet in the name of Russiagate, COVID, 1/6 and now Ukraine and decreed: it is urgent there be even more of this. They are echoing overwhelming Dem support for online censorship:

Understand that Twitter's base leans heavily to the left. This base supported and may have often participated in criminal acts during the pandemic, including the manipulation of people's decisions as to whether to volunteer for a medical experiment, whether or not they were funded by governments to do so. They may have been involved in intentionally projecting a wall of false information about safe medicine on the back of the larger media's conspiracies of silence.

Will we find out who was behind numerous retweet storms of blatantly misleading information, or whether propagandists worked together in DMs?

What will happen when the first domino falls?

Can those people even just up and leave Twitter so easily (emotionally)? And can Twitter review their personal data, with or without a warrant? The answers may vary with the circumstances. That has to be chilling to some people who willingly lied about what they knew.

What we find out from the inside of Twitter could be more damning. Anyone in the company found to have aided or even directed criminal activity on the platform may be discovered by a new regime if it chooses to sift through the data.

Aside from direct evidence, what will people see when they read the tweets of the unjailed? There will be a list of doctors, scientists, and others made (I'll be sure of it) whose information was suppressed during the pandemic. How many people will step forward and say that if they'd heard such information, they would have made different choices? How many of them got sick(er), were injured, or died?

Justin Hart @justin_hart

Hey @elonmusk - here is a quick list of my colleagues who were kicked off of Twitter for expressing their opinions on Covid-19 and displaying wrongthink.

I can think of a few additional names to add to this list like Dr. Brian Tyson, Dr. Lynn Fynn, and the various accounts of Dr. Ah Kahn Syed. Please add any additional examples you recall in the comments below. I'd like to advertise where to look if their accounts reappear, with fully restored history.

There will be medical lawsuits barring a total breakdown of civilization. They will change the face of society, if it hasn't crumbled.

On another note, the election issue is unique in many ways. Say what you will about whether voting machines with active connections to the internet and sudden ballot spikes at 4 AM are suspicious (and they are), or that the tale of broken custody of the thumb drive with the ballot data is beyond merely fishy, or [redacted] and [redacted], the possibility that some Twitter employees directly aided in the suppression of germaine information involving one of the candidates stands out as egregious.

Will Elon take an active interest?

It is an interesting and informative question to ask what happens with an election-related crime when it takes 18 months (that's how long it's been since the election) to begin sifting through an enormous database of evidence—a process which could itself take many more months. Supposing that the investigation is fruitful, it would be the new owner of Twitter responsible for finding the former owners culpable, or at least handing those documents to a DOJ that might just wipe their asses with them. Even worse—would the federal government…fine Twitter? How does this even work in corporate law?

Greg Abbott @GregAbbott_TX

.@elonmusk. Bring Twitter to Texas to join Tesla, SpaceX & the Boring company.

Okay…how would that work in Texas?

Just past the complex question of corporate law, which I'm not even certain anyone has fully thought through to answer completely, crimes committed would likely take several years to prosecute, at which point the booty won by alleged election pirates is fully consumed as a good. Obama could walk back into the political picture and heroically take the helm of the Democratic Party. As absurd as such instant absolvement of the party might seem, it is not the virtue of the party, but hatred for the others, that drives politics for many voters. At that point, we're left with a gross set of incentives directed like ballistic missiles at democracy.

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Final Thoughts

Do we have reason to believe, aside from the extreme ramping of censorship during the pandemic, that Elon's beef with censorship relates to the pandemic specifically? As in…would he take a personal interest in the process of unraveling what took place in the Offices of TwitterHub Central?

Elon Musk @elonmusk

in case u need to lose a boner fast

Like I said at the outset, I'm not an Elon fanboy. I keep in mind that Elon is a genius who could certainly play one role publicly, and another one privately. That's harder for an engineer focused on building electric cars and delivering targeted nuclear payloads to the Martian surface, but I won't say it's impossible. If Elon is an evil genius, he might just outsource the scripting of the drama. That's not unheard of. It wasn't Rockefeller who figured out that handing dimes to people on the streets won the people over.

It's even possible that Elon has no choice but to play a role in the grand scheme of things. Electric cars (and trucks) could be a poison tracking pill that could limit the free movement by, or the reception of goods to people per government demand. That's a whole lot of power (pardon the pun), including remote engine shutdown. For the moment, the U.S. federal government has the power to force anyone to play any role.

Hopefully "Bitcoin fixes that."

In the meantime, all things considered, I see signs of hope. For the moment, I'll enjoy them, even if I won't count the chickens before they hatch.

Somehow, I suspect he isn't moving on…just yet.

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Elon's Twitter as a Weapon of Mass Induction