Someone Brought the Receipts

LA Times reporter Russ Mitchell, looks at Elon Musk's claim that he wants to buy Twitter to support free speech, and notes that Elon Musk has a record of vociferiously attacking speech when it something that he does not want people to hear about him.

Republicans support the bid because they think that with the Apartheid emerald mine heir in charge, Donald Trump will return to the platform.  (Probably true, toxic narcissist professional courtesy) 

He has used non-disclosure agreements and the fact that people do not want to sue someone who can hire white-shoe lawyers by the bushel to stifle criticism, and he has used his Twitter induce his followers to harass and threaten people who say things about him that he does not like:

Elon Musk might be serious about taking over Twitter. Or his hostile bid might be just a rich man’s whim, a distraction he’ll abandon when it begins to bore him. Or maybe he’s punking everybody.

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In his bid to buy Twitter, he opened with a flourish that suggested levity, working the number “420" into his proffered share price. The weed joke evidently fell flat: The board created a “poison pill” provision to deter him.

Now, in need of support from shareholders and potential financiers, he has turned to rhetoric, laying out a grand if fuzzy vision for the Twitter he would build.

Calling himself a “free speech absolutist,” he said he wants to make the social network what he regards as a friendlier place for free expression by “being cautious about” permanent bans and loosening its content restrictions. “A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy,” he tweeted Tuesday.

That is the most stupid and facile thing that I have heard from Musk for a while, which is saying a lot.

This is, after all, the guy who wanted to move PayPal from Linux to Windows in the late 1990s, when even Microsoft was not make Hotmail work on Windows until nearly a decade later.

He also said he would make Twitter transparent about its inner workings, open-sourcing the algorithm it uses to sort and amplify tweets so it’s no longer a “black box.”

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Start with transparency. According to Musk, Twitter posts are “mysteriously promoted or demoted with no insight into what’s going on” and who or what is making the decisions. “Having a black box algorithm promote some things and not other things, I think this can be quite dangerous,” he said at the TED conference last week. He suggested posting Twitter code on the open source developer site GitHub.

Github is owned by Microsoft, which shielded fellow billionaire and serial sexual abuser Bill Gates for decades.

There’s some irony around Musk’s critical use of the term “black box.” Tesla has its own algorithmic black box in its cars — the one responsible for automated driving.

And THAT  black box continues to kill and injure people.

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“We would like him to be a little more transparent with respect to the safety of his Teslas,” said Alain Kornhauser, who heads the autonomous vehicle program at Princeton University. “A lot of us think they’re safe. We’d like to do an independent evaluation and offer a second opinion. I think it would help him and help the world.”

To get details on a car’s performance before and after a crash, Tesla owners, police and lawyers have had to have a subpoena issued to compel the company to share data.

Physician, heal thyself.

And then there is his response to whistleblowers and other critics.

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Musk did not reply to requests for comment. Almost alone among major public companies, Tesla does not have a media relations department.

Then there’s the question of Musk’s alleged free-speech absolutism. When it comes to the speech of others, particularly his employees and critics, his commitment has been anything but absolute. Far from defending their right to speak up, he has sought to stifle them with legal muzzles or responded with firings, lawsuits or even the hiring of private detectives.

Cristina Balan, who raised alarms about vehicle safety while working as an engineer at Tesla, is one of several whistleblowers who has encountered Musk’s wrath after going public. Shortly after scheduling a meeting with Musk to make her case, she was fired, and the company began slipping false information about her to a reporter. Balan’s defamation case against Tesla is still in the courts. “Musk is an absolutist about absolutism, which is the exact opposite of free speech,” Balan told The Times.

Although many companies press employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, Tesla has been a particularly profligate user of them, and of arbitration agreements that prevent those suing the company from making their allegations part of the public record. Tesla requires customers testing its Full Self-Driving technology to sign nondisclosure agreements that say they should “selectively” choose what they post to YouTube because “there are a lot of people that want Tesla to fail.”

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Critics outside the company are hardly immune. When Tesla ran into image problems in China, the company responded by asking the Chinese government to censor critical posts by social media users there, Bloomberg reported last year.

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Musk sometimes paints a bull’s-eye on journalists who report negative news about Tesla. He once accused Business Insider reporter Linette Lopez of using inside information to benefit short sellers who were betting against Tesla. Insider trading is a crime sometimes enforced by the SEC.

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It may be that Musk, if his long-shot pursuit of Twitter comes to fruition, prioritizes unfettered speech and transparency for its users and employees. If so, it will be a departure from the way he has operated to date.

I do not get why this guy gets a pass on everything. 

It is not deserved.