This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on April 6th, 2022.
After Elon Musk’s big purchase in Twitter, the Tesla boss is the company’s largest shareholder. His personal disputes around free speech point to a possible matter of principle — one worth putting many billions behind.
It was an unusual letter that Elon Musk and his lawyers filed with the court in New York in late March this year. It had, admittedly, all the usual references to earlier cases, an abundance of footnotes, and a faintly passive-aggressive tone. But toward the end, an odd quote turned up.
“The SEC won’t let me be or let me be so let me see They tried to shut me down…”
It’s (almost) a quote from rapper Eminem’s 2002 hit “Without Me”. But where Eminem talks about “FCC”, the US agency for media, Musk has put “SEC” instead, the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Eminem’s song is about feeling censored by the aforementioned agency. Apparently Musk feels aggrieved in a similar way.
Musk has had a long-running feud with the SEC since 2018, when they forced a lawyer to review his tweets before they could be published to the public. The ruling came after he hinted on Twitter that he would take Tesla private — something that caused confusion (and subsequently didn’t happen).
Since then Musk has argued that his free speech has been restricted. And his interest in the issue seems to have grown sharply.
Just a week or so ago, Musk ran a poll on Twitter asking his audience whether they thought Twitter “rigorously adhered to the principle” of free speech. Seventy percent said no. Musk added that “the consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” The following day he wrote that Twitter was undermining democracy by not sticking to the principles of free speech.
At the time of the poll, it’s possible Musk had already bought into Twitter. His stock purchase became public on Monday when a filing from — of all places — the SEC was made public, but the buy happened earlier than that. In total, 9.2 percent of Twitter’s shares are now owned by Musk, making him the single largest shareholder. One of the founders, and former CEO, Jack Dorsey, has 2.25 percent ownership by comparison.
The choice of filing implies a passive ownership stake, since a different form is usually used by someone with more activist intent. But Musk is rarely passive about anything. He went straight onto Twitter’s board and is promising product improvements within a few months.
Adding another company name to his business card is nothing new for Musk. He’s also CEO and shareholder of the space company SpaceX and Neuralink, which works on brain implants. He co-founded The Boring Company, which drills tunnels for transport.
He’s also used to big-money deals. Last year, Musk sold Tesla stock worth around $16 billion, roughly SEK 150 billion. Even so, he’s still the company’s single largest shareholder. A single investment of around $3 billion, like the one in Twitter, should be seen in that context.
But where Musk’s other companies have been more inventive and exploratory, you can think of Twitter as a kind of infrastructure for ideas. It’s one of the smaller social networks in terms of users, but all the more influential — especially in politics, tech, and media. Musk is therefore not stepping into Twitter for the money. He doesn’t need it. Rather, he probably sees the company as a tool for running a campaign for free speech in practice. Instead of starting a competing platform as Trump did, he’s buying into where the users already are.
Social networks have been dogged for years by the problem of content and moderation. Free speech in society is often mistaken for free speech on individual private companies’ platforms. Musk’s comments suggest he sees it the same way: Twitter harms democracy by not letting everyone speak freely.
But letting everyone say whatever they want, however they want, has rarely produced the kind of good and fruitful conversation that Musk and others say they’re after. It’s not just the laws that set the limits, but how the product works. A new billionaire at the helm will not solve that question overnight.