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Hello there everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, April 18, 2022, the day after Easter.
It's about 3.45 in the afternoon here on the East Coast.
And the controversy over Elon Musk's offer to purchase Twitter continues.
We have been watching the interviews that he's been giving
and cutting snippets that we really like and posting them on Judge Knapp.
Here's one that we really like.
Listen to this phrase, maximum trusted and broadly inclusive.
Go for it, Elon.
And I should also say the intent is to retain as many shareholders as is allowed by the law in a private company, which I think is around 2,000 or so.
So it's definitely not from the standpoint of let me figure out how to monopolize or maximize my ownership of Twitter.
But we'll try to bring along as many shoulders as we're allowed to.
You don't necessarily want to pay out 40 or whatever it is billion dollars in cash.
You'd like them to come with you.
Yeah, but it's, I mean, I could technically afford it.
I heard that.
I heard that.
But what I'm saying is this is not a way to sort of make money you know i think this is
it's just that i think this is um this could my my strong intuitive sense is that
uh having a public platform that is maximally trusted um and and and and broadly inclusive
um is extremely important to the future of civilization.
So this is an economic judgment on his part.
What is Twitter worth?
What are the shares worth?
What is a fair payment for it?
Nobody is forced to sell it to him. There will be a problem if the board prevents him from
trying to buy the shares because the shareholders have the right to sell their shares for whatever
they want. At some point, he'll just keep raising the offer and the number will be so good that the
shareholders won't be able to resist it. Someone criticized me the other day for saying, do you really want a government to forcing private businesses to open up their books and open up their platforms?
No, of course I don't.
This has nothing to do with the government.
As much as I disagree with much of the politics of Twitter, I have defended furiously their right to post on their bulletin board whatever they want.
The First Amendment restrains government. The First Amendment does not restrain
private enterprise. But here you have somebody that wants to buy Twitter,
openly boasting that he wants it to be maximally trusted and broadly inclusive,
that he wants speech on there by people who hate him or saying hateful things
about him. And he wants people deciding what's being posted who have an attitude like yours
truly does, a libertarian attitude that the benefit of the doubt is in favor of the speech.
The speech is presumed valid and worthy of being posted, unless, of course, it's prohibited by law in the country
in which it's being posted. One of the other clips, which we didn't run, asked him, well,
what would you do if someone said, I hate politician X, I want politician X killed?
We're not talking about Vladimir Putin, we're talking about a domestic politician.
And then they posted a picture of politician X with a gun sight over his face. Well, such a posting would be unlawful in
most countries, including the United States, and Elon Musk obviously would comply with the law.
But in that gray area between harm and offense, if the harm is prohibited by law,
then he's going to comply with the law. But if the harm and the offense are not prohibited by law,
then the benefit of the doubt is going to go to the speaker. Here's the law for the government.
The government doesn't always follow this, but here's the law for the government. All innocuous speech is absolutely
protected, and all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to rebut it.
So it is far better that hateful, incendiary, arousing speech be posted so that others can rebut that speech rather than that
the hateful incendiary speech be suppressed. That's what I think you'll get from Elon Musk.
Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.