Tangle - Elon Musk joins Twitter.

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

Yesterday, the social media platform Twitter announced that Musk would be joining its board of directors. The announcement came just a day after the company said Musk had bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest single shareholder of the company. Plus, Isaac's response to listener criticism.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Soule, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about Elon Musk and Mr. Musk's investment in Twitter, what that means, him being on the board of directors, all that good stuff. Also have a little bit of reader feedback or some comments about reader feedback and a reader question today. But as always, before we jump in, we'll start off with

some quick hits. First up, President Biden is expected to extend a pandemic-era pause on student loan payments through August 31st. The pause was set to end May 1st. Roughly 43 million borrowers will be impacted. Number two, Oklahoma lawmakers approved a bill to make nearly all abortions illegal, with a punishment of up to 10 years in prison for any health care provider who performs an abortion. Number three, Ukrainians are fleeing the Donbass region as Russia's military strategy appears to be shifting with a stronger focus on the eastern part of the country. 4. President Obama returned to the White House for the first time since 2017 yesterday, delivering remarks on the state of the health care to mark the 12-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act. Number five, the ex-wife of Missouri Republican Senate candidate Eric Greaton said in a new court filing that she has photographs and other documentation of Greaton's alleged abuse of her and their child. On the Money This Hour, Twitter now has its largest individual shareholder, and it is a pretty familiar name.

CNBC Senior Markets Correspondent Dominic Chu is joining us now with a look at several business headlines today. One of Twitter's loudest critics is now the largest shareholder of the company. Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought 73.5 million shares of Twitter, acquiring more than a 9% stake in his social media site. And now to the story that the world does not seem to be getting enough of. Elon Musk, he has become Twitter's biggest shareholder. A lot has happened in the last 24 hours. First, the news broke of Musk picking up a 9.2% stake in Twitter. Yesterday, the social media platform Twitter announced that Musk would be joining its board of directors. The announcement came just a day after the company said Musk had bought a 9.2%

stake in Twitter, making him the largest single shareholder of the company. Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our board, CEO Parag Agrawal said in a tweet. He's both a passionate believer and an intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need on Twitter and in the boardroom to make us stronger in the long term. As we discussed when former CEO Jack Dorsey resigned and during the Hunter Biden controversy, Twitter is a critical player in politics. It is the modern-day public town square, a central hub for political debates, one of the first places journalists share their reporting, and one of the few places ordinary citizens can interact directly with politicians and celebrities.

In the last few years, it has received even more attention because of the company's decisions on how to regulate the platform, including banning former President Trump and suspending other prominent politicians and celebrities' accounts. Numerous attempts to compete with the site, including Trump's Truth Social, have so far failed to disrupt the space at all. Musk, best known as the CEO of the electric car company Tesla, has a long and storied history on the platform. He has 80.5 million followers. In 2018, he announced on Twitter that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share, which led to litigation against him. He also once polled his followers about whether he should sell 10% of Tesla, which earned him an SEC subpoena. His tweets about Tesla

now have to be screened by a legal team before posting. Online, he is a divisive character, simultaneously one of the most successful businessmen alive, but also referred to as a shitposter, an online slang for someone who posts with the intent of derailing conversation via offensive or nonsensical content. Some have suggested Twitter is welcoming Musk with open arms because he is so wealthy he could simply buy the company if he wanted to. Elon's fortune is approaching $300 billion. In a moment, you're going to hear some reactions to the news from the left and the right, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the left is saying.

The left is worried about Musk joining the board, saying he may not be the free speech absolutist he claims to be. Some suggest Musk is simply playing with his money and his intentions are still unclear. Others say it's all about him controlling the things he likes. Timothy O'Brien said Musk's investment is bad news for free speech on the platform. Consider the poll he conducted on Twitter, of course, 10 days ago. Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy, it says. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? More than 2 million users responded to that question, with 70.4% of them voting no. A day later, Musk, who fashions himself a free speech absolutist, was on the social media platform again. Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done? This

time, he didn't bother with a poll, asking, is a new platform needed? All of this follows Musk's ongoing battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been monitoring his Twitter posts for a very good reason. They move markets, O'Brien wrote. Musk maintained in a court filing that the SEC's oversight seems calculated to chill his exercise of free speech. So, despite ample room in which to exercise his speech, and aggressively trying to curtail the free speech of some of his critics, Musk evidently feels aggrieved, O'Brien wrote. What's not clear is why Twitter is his target. His Twitter rants and raves have been wide-ranging and unfettered.

He once tweeted, then deleted, a meme comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler. He's tweeted transphobic memes. He's slagged the British cave explorer as a quote pedo guy. That's a lot of free speech, and Twitter hasn't done a lot to curtail it. It's not ideal to have a free speech absolutist who isn't absolutely in favor of free speech at the helm of, or even close to, a media company. In the New Republic, Alex Shepard said Musk may be up to nothing more than making money. To an extremely rich person, $2.9 billion in stock is a lot, but ultimately not that much. His net worth is nearly 100 times that, Shepard wrote. A fan of buying shiny things for the sake of buying them, Musk may very well just be acting like the prototypical rich tech guy.

He is an active Twitter user after all, so why not buy a significant stake at the company? The form he filled out to disclose his investment, meanwhile, indicates that he had not acquired the securities with any purpose or with the effect of changing or influencing the control of the issuer. Musk, however, has never cared much for rules and seems to actually enjoy tangling with the SEC. That Musk posted his poll after acquiring shares in Twitter suggests he does indeed intend to pressure Twitter to change its policies, but then again, Musk seems to be governed almost entirely by whims. Should Musk fulfill his sort of promise to make Twitter adhere to free speech principles, his definition of them at least, it very well could be a nightmare for the company,

he wrote. Its response to demands for more content moderation have been slipshod and inconsistent, but are still better than the alternatives of doing nothing. Removing users who promote vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election points in the right direction, but has excited a furious counter-mobilization. As Trump ramps up his 2024 presidential campaign, calls for the former president's reinstatement will grow. Now those demands may find a receptive ear on the inside in Musk. Having gained a seat on the board, his influence will be profound, and he could still acquire more shares. In The Atlantic, Marina Koren said of course Musk wanted Twitter. He hasn't offered any explanation for the Twitter purchase yet, aside from a mischievous oh hi lol tweet soon after the news broke, but the move seems related

to his strong feelings about free speech. Musk has been talking a big game about its importance to society, but ultimately he values control of things he cares most about. Musk loves Twitter. It is his preferred medium, a tool for communicating directly with his fans. He's dropped major SpaceX news and comment threads, an outlet for trolling, and the place to announce headline-making moves. Earlier this year, after a Ukrainian government official asked Musk via Twitter to help with the country's connectivity problems, Musk dispatched dozens of dishes for SpaceX's internet satellite service Starlink. Not long after, he tweeted that some governments, not Ukraine, had asked Starlink satellites to block Russian news sources, but Musk said he wouldn't follow suit. We will not do so unless at gunpoint, Musk said, sorry to be a free speech absolutist.

Dip into Musk's history though and you'll find that his commitment to free speech has been less than absolute, Corrin wrote. He may like to be able to say anything he wants, but he bristles when what others want to say goes against his own preferences. He will grace his fans with engagement, but he has little interest in critics, and he has not always shown himself to be someone who welcomes people speaking their mind, especially not at his own companies. Musk's version of free speech, in practice, seems to be one in which only powerful people can say what they please and escape any negative All right, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right celebrated the news, saying Musk may have a positive influence on the public square. Many said it is the kind of change that could turn Twitter around.

Others suggested he's just another wealthy American trying to become a media mogul. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson said, it's a good day in America. Conservatives were taught from a very young age to support big business because big business was a bulwark against government overreach, Carlson said. And that made sense, and it was true for quite a while. But very few imagine what it would look like if big business harnessed monopoly power and then joined that power with government power to strip us of our constitutional rights. Again, this happened incrementally, but now it's here. So these aren't really free market companies. They resemble repressive governments. They're too big. They're too powerful for you to do anything about. You can't resist. So if you want to talk in public in 2022, you have to submit to their

censorship. It's depressing. It doesn't seem like there's a solution. That's what America looked like when we woke up this morning. But thankfully, and it's very nice to be able to say this on a Monday, things are changing and they appear to be changing fast. Elon Musk, who's best known as the head of Tesla and SpaceX, famously a billionaire, just announced he has bought an almost 10% stake in Twitter. That makes him the largest shareholder of Twitter. So why does this matter, Carlson explained? Well, because Twitter matters, whether you want it to or not. Twitter is hardly the largest social media platform, but Twitter sets the tone for all news coverage for all information. Twitter is where a

professional class goes to learn which opinions are acceptable and which are forbidden, and the effect is obvious to everybody. Could this be the first move in a hostile takeover of Twitter that transforms Twitter into a platform for free speech? Seems that way. Elon Musk is not an orthodox conservative, but he sees the people in power with devastating clarity. A few months ago, he described wokeness, that is to say, the ideology at the heart of Twitter's business operations, as one of the greatest threats to modern civilization. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said there might be a market solution to big tech censorship. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu,

a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older,

and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Mr. Musk hasn't disclosed his agenda for the company, but for now we'll consider this a helpful moment for political speech and debate at America's increasingly censorious tech giants, the board said. The co-founder of ventures ranging from Tesla to SpaceX to the Boring Company has frequently expressed disdain for Twitter's heavy-handed censorship, which the company uses to silence prominent voices, e.g. Donald Trump, and stifle views that disagree with the prevailing progressive consensus. Perhaps he thinks he can accomplish more in the room where

censorship happens. One test will be if Twitter keeps making decisions like censoring the Babylon Bee, the conservative satirical website for, quote, misgendering a Biden official, as The Hill put it. Big Tech is becoming more aware of the perils, political, financial, and legal, of serving as handmaidens to the woke speech police, but its executives remain too complicit or too afraid to do anything about it. They're courting a political backlash. Mr. Musk is familiar with the controversy on Twitter, and his tweets have sometimes aroused the attention of Washington financial regulators over disclosure rules. But in an age when too many CEOs lack the courage to express open support for core American principles, it would be refreshing if Mr. Musk's intention is to stake some of his own wealth in the cause of promoting political free speech.

Jack Schaefer said Musk is just joining a long line of billionaire media moguls. The Twitter gambit makes Musk look like Jeff Bezos, who plucked the Washington Post for placement in his financial bouquet, like Patrick Soon-Shiong, who harvested the Los Angeles Times, like Lorene Powell Jobs, who garnered the Atlantic and invested in other media properties, like Michael Bloomberg, who grew the lost leader Bloomberg News from scratch. Like John Henry, who reaped the Boston Globe and others, Schaefer said. As egg gives way to larva and larva surrenders to pupa, the billionaire often metamorphoses into media mogul before his wings fully form. He pollinates the pasture and his fortune finally dissipates or he dies. What's different about Musk's impending mogulhood is that most new rich

people swoop in with the intention to restore flagship publications to their former glory. In the above examples, the rescue cases were the Post, the Times, the Globe. But rescue is not Musk's motivation, he wrote. Twitter is largely self-sustaining and needs no billionaire to help regain lost glory. Instead, Musk is that obsessive Twitterer who loves so it's milk he wants to buy the cow. Also the herd, the dairy, the pasteurization plant. This makes Musk look like the person who doesn't like the way Twitter censors take, which brings us to my take. I think this is a great move for Twitter, and I think it could be a good move for political

discourse. I'm sure I could write a whole newsletter criticizing Elon Musk. He is brash and arrogant and ill-informed on issues he opines about loudly, and his commitment to free speech absolutism seems entirely dependent on the kind of speech he's encountering. He'll happily accuse a random person of being a pedophile, as he hides behind his free speech rights, but will exercise censorious authority and threaten legal action when criticism is directed towards him. In other words, he's a lot like basically everyone else on Twitter. The reason it's a good thing, though, is that Musk, despite sometimes serving as the face of the battle against climate change, is a cultural conservative in today's landscape. Twitter's impact on public opinion is often overstated, but there's no doubt its influence in the public

discourse is massive. A company that sets the tone for how, among other things, political news moves through the ether should also be a company that has some ideological diversity at the top. That is really the central cause for optimism here. Musk isn't taking over, but he's getting a seat at the table, a big one. Based on everything we know about the current CEO and the way the company has made decisions about regulating the platform, Musk will disagree with pretty much everyone else on the board. As Agrawal put it, he's both a passionate believer and an intense critic of the service. That's a great reason to hire somebody. That's the kind of reason I'd hire someone to join Tangle. Twitter has been scrubbing far-right voices for years and more recently has been on a tear, removing legitimate news stories

or banning people who question the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and where the virus came from. I've criticized many of those views, and I've long held that platforms like Twitter should have a default position to let contradicting content battle it out, even if some of that content is offensive, misinformation, or controversial. That's not to say there shouldn't be limits. There have to be, and every platform has rules. But, Musk has been outspoken about Twitter's past decisions, many of which were wrong, and it's conceivable that if he had been on the board before, his voice may have helped facilitate a more thoughtful application of the moderation standards. Right now, it's clear that Twitter applies those standards unevenly and inconsistently.

Best of all, though, is the simple fact that Musk loves Twitter. He has a bigger and more interactive presence on the platform than the former CEO Jack Dorsey and then just about any other Twitter employee I know of. He engages random people, celebrities, politicians, and more. He shares knowledge, comments on stuff he probably shouldn't, breaks news, starts controversies, and posts silly, meaningless content. In essence, he uses the platform the way I think it should be used. And that's the kind of person who should have an influence on the platform's future.

All right, next up is your questions answered. Today's reader question comes from an anonymous reader in San Diego, California. They asked, do the latest jobs report numbers prove that Biden's approach to the economy is working? So I think the March jobs report is very good. Adding 431,000 jobs despite inflation, the disruptions from the war in Ukraine, and an ongoing pandemic, however waning, is all good news. Employers have added 400,000 plus jobs for 11 straight months. Quite a few reports have been revised upward and the unemployment rate is down to 3.6%. That can be a messy number because it depends on labor participation,

but it is headed in the right direction. All that being said, the big weight tied around the administration's ankles is inflation. Wages climbed 5.6% in March from the previous year, which was nearly double the pre-pandemic average of 3%. Yet the wage growth is still being outpaced by the cost of goods, and as long as that is the case, Americans are not going to feel the gains. So is it working? I don't think I'd go as far as saying it's proof of anything. Economic numbers like this require longer snapshots than just a month for any clarity, but I certainly took it as an encouraging report.

All right, before we get into our story that matters, I want to do a quick address about yesterday's newsletter. So this just feels appropriate in the Your Questions Answered. It's kind of the reader interaction segment. But yesterday was one of those days where quite a few tangle readers and listeners unsubscribed from the newsletter or wrote in to criticize the podcast because they were upset or disappointed about my take. As I always say, my goal here is to be honest about what I'm seeing. If you think my take on something is biased or wrongheaded or I missed something or I just got something factually wrong, I want to hear from you. Write in. We can talk about it. I may even share your feedback in

the podcast. I actually tried to do that today, but the critics who I reached out to all declined to have their comments published publicly. So I'm not going to publish the positive feedback I got on its own, but there was a good mix yesterday. Still, though, a lot of people unsubscribed or at least wrote in to tell me they were unsubscribing. Please don't leave. Engaging views that you may not like

is one of the central objectives of my project. And while I try my best to be balanced, honest, and straightforward, I'm not going to self-censor my own views or tamp down my emotion if I'm feeling some emotion or feeling strongly about my position. That's not what this is about. I'm not trying to be just a centrist on every issue. I'm trying to be a moderate who's open-minded and addresses each issue individually because my views on the whole don't fit squarely into either side. So thank you to those of you who

wrote in, who are upset about what I wrote, but address me with, you know, some clarity, some thoughtfulness, poke some holes in my logic. That kind of stuff helps me. It makes me better to those of you unsubscribed. I guess you're probably not listening or paying attention anymore, but you know, I wish you stick around. I think that's what this is really all about in the end. All right, that's it for my spiel. On to our story that matters for the day. Prosecutors are now calling the looting of the COVID-19 relief plan known as the Paycheck Protection Program, PPP, one of the largest frauds in U.S. history.

Tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the pandemic was instead spent on luxury cars, mansions, private jets, and swanky vacations by a wide array of criminals and fraudsters who took the money. While we knew there was some amount of fraud, we are just now beginning to understand the scale. Experts say as much as $80 billion, or about 10% of the $800 billion handed out in PPP, was stolen. That's on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the COVID employment relief program, and on top of the $80 billion potentially pilfered from a separate COVID disaster relief program. Nothing like this has ever happened before, Matthew

Schneider, a former U.S. attorney from Michigan, told NBC News, it is the biggest fraud in a generation. The sum of taxpayer money stolen could rival the $579 billion in federal funding recently passed for in Biden's infrastructure plan. NBC News has a story. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, on to our numbers section, 27%. That is the rise in Twitter's share price since must purchase was revealed. Twitter's goal for its number of daily users by the end of 2023 is 315 million. The number of US adults who say they use Twitter is one in five. The number of years

Twitter has existed is 16. And the number of daily users on Facebook is 1.93 billion. All right, last but not least, our have a nice day section. I'm still not really sure what to think about this story, but I couldn't resist posting it. New research suggests that mushrooms talk to each other. A new study says fungi are communicating with each other and have been recorded having conversations in a language similar to human speech. The conversations are happening through long underground filamentous structures called hyphae, which can send electrical impulses similar to those generated by nerve cells transmitting information within human bodies. Professor Andrew Adamatsky from the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of West of England studied these impulses and says the electrical spikes often

clustered into trains of activity resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words. Screenshot Media has the very trippy story, which you can find a link to in today's newsletter. All right, everybody, that is it for the podcast. As as always if you want to support our work go to readtangle.com membership and become a paying subscriber it gets you access to all sorts of great stuff and plus you can keep this podcast going for free that's it for today and we'll see you right back here tomorrow. Same time. Peace. was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history,

and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province.

Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.