Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, in an extensive TED interview, revealed why he made a bid to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, or $43 billion.
Musk revealed why onstage at Ted2022 in Vancouver, Canada on Thursday saying.
“I believe it is critical to have a welcoming environment for free speech,” Musk stated. “Twitter has essentially replaced the town square, and it’s critical that people have both the reality and the idea that they can talk freely within the law.”
Musk stated that one of his ambitions for the platform is to make the Twitter source code open-source so that it can be scrutinized by the public. He stated,
“The code should be on GitHub so that it may be analyzed.” “I simply believe it is critical to the functioning of democracy in the United States and elsewhere. If we can build trust in Twitter as a public platform, the civilizational risk is reduced.”
An Edit button
Musk said he wouldn’t be modifying his own tweets, but the public should know if someone did, after polling Twitter users last week on whether they want an edit button.
When asked how an edit function would work, Musk said he envisioned a time limit for edits, as well as a reset of retweets and responses, to exclude the possibility that a changed tweet would appear to have the same reactions as the original tweet.
Free speech on Twitter
The internet mogul, who has been fined by the SEC several times for his tweets, has described himself as a free speech absolutist but has conceded that a centralized company’s ability to allow certain things is limited.
“In the United States, there are some restrictions on free speech, and Twitter would have to follow those restrictions,” he said. “Twitter, in my opinion, should comply with all applicable laws; this is a legal requirement. However, knowing what’s going on behind the scenes might be quite harmful.”
Musk described his vision of a platform that supports free speech as follows: “Someone you don’t like being able to say something you don’t like is a good sign of free speech. That is an indication of a healthy environment for free speech.”
Musk claims that while he has the financial means to buy Twitter and take it private, he prefers to keep as many Twitter stockholders as possible. “I don’t care about the economics at all,” he said, reiterating that he’d be buying Twitter for the benefit of its users.
