Twitter has a new sheriff in town, and his name is Elon Musk. The world’s wealthiest man offered to buy the social media site for $44 billion, and the company’s board accepted the offer yesterday.
Musk has many reasons for buying the company, but his main drive appears to be to preserve—or even strengthen—the site’s commitment to the principles of free speech.
“Twitter is the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” tweeted Musk.
Admittedly, the town square analogy is imperfect, as my colleague Liz Wolfe highlighted in her excellent post on the subject. For one thing, Twitter is a private company, rather than a genuinely public space, which means that it is not bound by the First Amendment. Unlike the actual town square, Twitter retains the right to punish users for perfectly legal speech. It’s also the case that while Twitter is incredibly important for the political class, journalists, business leaders, and other social influencers, it’s not nearly as big or as frequently visited as Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick put it, the entire internet is really the town square; Twitter is one small space that’s part of it.
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No comments on Twitter with Musk
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The number one single today in 1963 was recorded by a 15-year-old, the youngest number one singer to date:
The number one British single today in 1967 was that year’s Eurovision song contest winner:
The number one single today in 1985:
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Over the last week, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk arranged $46.5 billion in financing to follow through on his unsolicited offer to Twitter’s board to buy the social media site from them. This afternoon, the board accepted Musk’s offer to buy the company for $54.20 a share.
Long a Twitter power user/troll/loudmouth, Musk bought a 9.2 percent stake in the company last month, becoming the largest shareholder, before deciding he’d rather have the whole thing.
Cue hysteria! Musk haters have taken to the site to declare that Donald Trump will now probably win the 2024 election, that Musk’s bid is really about white power, that Section 230 must be reformed, and that, yes, Musk’s new policies will be lethal. (Perhaps the death toll will be even larger than net neutrality‘s!)
So, for users of the platform, what’s likely to change?
Musk has panned the site’s existing content moderation policies, saying they are too restrictive and encroach on people’s ability to speak freely without being censored. Some liberalization of these policies and the re-platforming of controversial figures like former President Donald Trump—who was banned in the wake of the January 6 riot for inciting violence among his fans—seems likely, though unpopular with droves of users.
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Imagine having tickets to today’s 1964 NME winner’s poll concert at Wembley Empire Pool in London:
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The number one single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one album today in 1987 was U2’s “The Joshua Tree”:
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The Walt Disney Co. needs Florida more than Florida needs Walt Disney. That’s the latest chapter in this tale of a CEO who followed his woke staff like a lemming off the cliff of cultural politics. Disney employees demanded that Mickey Mouse oppose Florida’s misdescribed “don’t say gay” bill. Now state lawmakers are reacting by putting down a few glue traps.
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The Florida Legislature voted this week to abolish the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which in effect lets Disney World run its own private government. Created by the Legislature in 1967, the district covers about 40 square miles and features two water parks and four theme parks, including the Magic Kingdom. Disney essentially controls land use, environmental protection, fire service, utilities, more than 100 miles of roads, and more. …
The Journal cites a source who knows Disney’s finances and says the district saves the company tens of millions of dollars a year. Without it, services like fixing potholes could revert to county government.
Disney largely funds the Reedy Creek district, which had about $150 million in revenue last year. It also carries close to $1 billion in debt. The mayor of Orange County warned Thursday that if the district goes, then upkeep will “fall to the county’s budgets,” putting “an undue burden on the rest of the taxpayers.” The headaches look large enough that it’s difficult not to wonder about the bill’s effective date. It dissolves the Reedy Creek district on June 1, 2023—time for Disney and Mr. DeSantis to make up.
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The Wall Street Journal:
Twitter Inc. is in discussions to sell itself to Elon Musk and could finalize a deal as soon as this week, people familiar with the matter said, a dramatic turn of events just 10 days after the billionaire unveiled his $43 billion bid for the social-media company.
The two sides met Sunday to discuss Mr. Musk’s proposal and were making progress, though still had issues to hash out, the people said. There are no guarantee they will reach a deal.
Twitter had been expected to rebuff the offer, which Mr. Musk made April 14 without saying how he would pay for it, and put in place a so-called poison pill to block him from increasing his stake. But after the Tesla Inc. TSLA -0.37% chief disclosed that he has $46.5 billion in financing and the stock market swooned, Twitter changed its posture and opened the door to negotiations, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Sunday.
Mr. Musk has said from the beginning that his $54.20-a-share offer is his “best and final,” and he reiterated to Twitter’s chairman Bret Taylor again in recent days that he won’t budge on price, some of the people said. The conversations between the two sides were expected to focus on issues including what Mr. Musk would pay should an agreed deal fall apart before being consummated.
Twitter is slated to report first-quarter earnings Thursday and had been expected to weigh in on the bid then, if not sooner.
The potential turnabout on Twitter’s part comes after Mr. Musk met privately Friday with several shareholders of the company to extol the virtues of his proposal while repeating that the board has a “yes-or-no” decision to make, according to people familiar with the matter. He also pledged to solve the free-speech issues he sees as plaguing the platform and the country more broadly, whether his bid succeeds or not, they said.
Mr. Musk made his pitch to select shareholders in a series of video calls, with a focus on actively managed funds, the people said, in hopes that they could sway the company’s decision.
Mr. Musk said he sees no way Twitter management can get the stock to his offer price on its own, given the issues in the business and a persistent inability to correct them. It couldn’t be learned if he detailed specific steps he would take, though he has tweeted about wanting to reduce the platform’s reliance on advertising, as well as to make simpler changes such as allowing longer tweets.
Some shareholders rallied behind him following the meetings. Lauri Brunner, who manages Thrivent Asset Management LLC’s large-cap growth fund, sees Mr. Musk as a skilled operator. “He has an established track record at Tesla,” she said. “He is the catalyst to deliver strong operating performance at Twitter.” Minneapolis-based Thrivent has a roughly 0.4% stake in Twitter worth $160 million and is also a Tesla shareholder.
Mr. Musk already has said he is considering taking his bid directly to shareholders by launching a tender offer. Even if he was to get significant shareholder support in a tender offer—which is far from guaranteed—he would still need a way around the company’s poison pill, a legal maneuver it employed that effectively blocks him from building his stake to 15% or more.
One oft-employed tactic to push a bid, seeking to gain control of the target’s board, is out of reach for now. Twitter’s directors have staggered terms, meaning a dissident shareholder would need multiple years to gain control rather than a single shareholder vote. Twitter tried last year to phase out the staggered board terms given that they are frowned upon by the corporate-governance community, but not enough shareholders voted on the measure. The company is attempting to do so again at this year’s annual meeting set for May 25. Only two directors are up for re-election, and it is too late for Mr. Musk to nominate his own.
Twitter’s shares have been trading below his offer price since he made the bid April 14, typically a sign that shareholders are skeptical a deal will happen, though they did close up roughly 4% Friday at $48.93, the day after he unveiled financing for the deal. Mr. Musk has indicated that if the current bid fails, he could sell his stake, which totals more than 9%.
The financing included more than $25 billion in debt coming from nearly every global blue-chip investment bank aside from the two advising Twitter. The remainder was $21 billion in equity Mr. Musk would provide himself, likely by selling existing stakes in his other businesses such as Tesla. The speed at which the financing came together and the market selloff in recent days—which makes the all-cash offer look relatively more attractive—likely contributed to Twitter’s greater willingness to entertain Mr. Musk’s proposal.
Twitter’s board should engage with Mr. Musk since its stock has “gone nowhere” since the company went public eight years ago, Jeff Gramm, a portfolio manager with Bandera Partners LLC, a New York hedge fund with about $385 million under management, said earlier. The firm last bought Twitter shares in February and owns about 950,000 overall, which accounts for about 11% of its portfolio.
Mr. Gramm said Twitter’s board can’t walk away from Mr. Musk’s offer without providing an alternative that gives real value to shareholders. “I’m not sure what that can be at this stage besides finding a higher bid,” he said.
This will give Twitter employees a new attack of the vapors this morning.
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The number one British single today in 1959, although you may think …
The number one single today in 1961:
The number one single today in 1965:
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The number one British single today in 1964 was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but not performed by any of the Beatles:
Where might you have heard what was the number one British single today in 1969?
The number one single today in 1977:
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I’m a Trekker and a Catholic. I will speak about Trek at the drop of a bathlet.
I know what I like and it’s tiresome to be told that I shouldn’t like something just because Gene Roddenberry was a selfish, drug-using, philandering atheist. Though Trek sported an anti-capitalist message, Roddenberry was a craven pursuer of lucre and fame even to the point of cheating writers and producers, Sandy Courage and Gene Coon, out of their own fair shares.
Very few writers could withstand Roddenberry’s presence because of his legendary abrasive attitude, manipulativeness, selfishness and temper. According to his assistant, Ande Richardson, Roddenberry was a “freaky-deaky dude,” and a “sexist … who disregarded women.” But despite the fact that I find Rodenberry’s personal life to be morally abhorrent, repellant and typical of a narcissistic atheist, I’m not one to judge. I believe that he created something memorable and artistic. I will pray for his soul but his character has never made me give up on Trek.
One might ask how I can separate the two. One might be surprised at my answer. When I get together with like-minded Trekkers, we never discuss the “feelings” screen characters portray. Instead, we try to stump each other with Trek trivia. We ponder the existence of life on other planets and postulate what form that life would take. We wonder if tribbles would make good pets — and thus, they’d be no tribble at all. We contemplate what would be the Earth vegetable equivalent to plomeek soup and what sandwiches would go well with Romulan ale. We tell jokes about Klingons that only other sci-fi aficionados would grok. We never discuss the “feelings” or professed “identity” of any character or actor playing said characters.
Which brings us to Trek’s newest iteration, Star Trek: Discovery. Premiering in 2017, Discovery is the seventh Star Trek series. All Trek is great even when it’s bad but Discovery is so bad it’s irredeemable. It’s faddish and therefore has neither moral nor intellectual integrity. Rather than being countercultural, Discovery totes the liberal party line. It’s preachy, whereas earlier Trek permutations gave “food for thought” set within a framework (as best they could) of logic and rational thought. Discovery is vindictively and presumptuously narcissistic. It presumes that they have worked out the moral and intellectual implications of their policies and “morality” but the writers never want to show their work.
Discovery has more homosexual, bisexual and transsexual characters than you can shake a phaser at, and they threaten to add even more. They are overrepresented and their characterizations take up a great deal of screen time. At one point, the Mirror Terran Empress Philippa Georgiou (portrayed by Michelle Yeoh) — a particularly vile, repellent and treacherous character —once lambasted another character for not being “pansexual” instead of gay. And worse than that, every character is convinced that their raison d’êtreis to indulge each and every one of their feelings instead of putting their emotions aside in order to fight aliens.
The show is an inept lark redolent with every misandrist fantasy trope imaginable, all devoid of even a semblance of science. Male characters barely have any screentime and when they do, they portray betas obsessed with their “feelings.” Now, if I understand intersectionalist theory, I’m not allowed to enjoy the show because I don’t see myself “represented” on it. It’s simply not entertaining. Its primary purpose is to strike a blow against something — I suspect good taste, good writing, good acting, logic and common sense.
This is the show where every willowy, wispy woman can wrassle with wascally trained assassins well outside their weight class and come out the winner. Kirk at least could be counted upon for a well-placed judo chop every now and again and Spock always had his handy Vulcan Nerve Pinch in a pinch. Discovery exists in a universe where the patriarchy is dead and replaced by a matriarchy obsessed with the feelings of every living creature in the known universe. But, instead of the Age of Aquarius utopia that enlightened matriarchs promised to usher in, these women are still up to slaughtering aliens with an élan that I would label as disturbing. Nothing has changed in the matriarchy of the future except for gender roles and sexuality and, of course, the de rigeur atheism.
In Gene Roddenberry’s Original Star Trek (TOS), the Enterprise had a chapel which had hosted at least five marriages and several funerals. His Star Trek: The Next Generation’s crew celebrated Christmas on board the Enterprise-D. Discovery, on the other hand, has a cold, empty feel because the characters are living in a godless universe, not at all curious about the vast cosmic wonders circling around them and never once asking, “How did all of this get here in the first place?”
I like science fiction but have no patience for unthinking, feminist, Harlequin space-fantasy novels. Interestingly, the lack of God and the contempt for religion coupled with “creative” sexualities in general is startling on Discovery. I’m reminded of Ven. Fulton Sheen’s oft-quoted quote:
A popular God-is-dead book in the United States argues that homosexuality will become normal in a humanistic society where there is no restriction of morals which come from religion. St. Paul declared homosexuality and atheism were related to one another as effect to cause.
A television program that promotes homosexuality, secularism, scientism, atheism and utopia. It wouldn’t be the first time anyone ever accused Fulton Sheen — or the Catholic Church, for that matter — of prescience.
Trek isn’t a brilliant and creative idea because of all of alien latex masks, ray guns and exploding planets. Rather, as all good science fiction does, it reflects our present society and the nature of humanity. Discovery is bad science fiction because it doesn’t reflect anything except for illiberal liberalism. The actors flagrantly abuse the audience’s forbearance to withstand their unrepressed emotions expressed in what Tina Fey’s 30 Rock character Liz Lemon called “talking like this” — a distracting, whispery, gravely growl meant to convey both sincerity and conviction and ultimately delivering neither.
They come off as self-absorbed lovers softly exchanging platitudes even when discussing the newest alien threat to the ship. It’s annoying and pretentious and that’s why I believe James Tiberius Kirk to be the superior captain. No matter what the nature of the mission, Kirk was eager to train the ship’s phasers on any given planet and blast its citizenry into the next dimension and I welcomed it every week.
My viewership these days is now perfunctory and an exercise in patience rather than admiration of an artistic ideal. I’ve watched the show dutifully as I’ve watched every other Trek-related show but now, my patience and its artistry has ebbed away completely. I don’t watch Trek for the romance or the airing of the next sexually immoral grievance. I want to see aliens in weird latex masks shooting each other with ray guns and watch planets explode. I’m tired of the gender-bending, the preaching and lauding of atheism, the narcissistic contempt for any opinion other than the wokest of woke. It’s a wokist nightmare from which I fear I might not wake. It’s time to eject Discovery out of the nearest airlock.
I didn’t leave Trek — Trek left me. As a Catholic, I’m required to love people, not television programs. It’s time for me to hang up my Spock ears and my all-access backstage pass for Trek conventions. Even 3D chess doesn’t excite me as it used to.
The irony of Roddenberry’s original Star Trek, which showed itself particularly in The Next Generation, was Roddenberry’s progressive belief that humankind could be perfected. It is illogical to assume that human nature can be engineered out of human beings. But humans can choose to rise above their baser instincts.
And as far as Roddenberry’s creation vs. real-life Roddenberry, it is also illogical to expect perfection from human beings.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 