At the end of last month, Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter and immediately afterward fired four of the company’s most senior executives.
In their place, he has installed a small council of lieutenants to assess the company and begin to implement his vision. The group includes Musk’s personal lawyer, his chief of staff, Alex Spiro, a couple of investor friends, Jason Calacanis and Jared Birchall, and a former Twitter executive who left the company years ago.
But the truth is that Elon Musk bought a version of Twitter with many built-in cybersecurity problems. Some cyber experts are concerned that the world’s richest man will only make things worse.
His first steps as Twitter’s owner: laying off more than half the workforce and creating paid services
Elon Musk has taken on an incredible amount of debt to buy Twitter. That could explain the acquisition chaos, staff cuts, and blue tick fees—or even the move to start charging users to send DMs to celebrities.
Regarding blue tick fees, the platform’s intention to charge users a monthly fee for verified accounts (around $8/month) has already triggered the first phishing campaign. Several Twitter users claim to have received phishing emails using the lure of losing their verified status to try to trick them into providing their credentials. According to users, the scam works through a Google document created to look like a Twitter help page.
On the other hand, if Twitter’s most prominent users leave the platform due to recent changes, that could allow criminals to impersonate them or even take over their accounts and use them to run smear campaigns. It could also allow cybercriminals to pay for verification and use those accounts for deception and scams.
But beyond Elon Musk having stormed into Twitter like a bull in a china shop, what is Elon Musk’s hidden interest in buying Twitter?
Elon Musk’s (hidden) interest in Twitter
Dave Troy, a renowned American investigative journalist who has closely followed the company since its early days, highlights what are very likely Elon Musk’s hidden intentions in buying Twitter.
And no, they are not economic. They are ideological.
- Twitter as a public good.
Elon Musk longs to turn Twitter into a “public good at the protocol level, not the company level.” He believes he can do more good for humanity if it is an open technology than if it is a company owned by a single person or by Wall Street investors trying to maximize profits for shareholders.
His goal, along with Jack Dorsey’s (they are close friends), is to create a foundational “Twitter” protocol that anyone can implement and run.
- A space without censorship and with freedom of speech
Musk and his backers believe the global geopolitical arena was being distorted by too much ideology and arbitrary censorship, which is why one of the first dismissals Musk carried out upon entering Twitter was that of the executive who decided to ban Trump.
They want to restore “freedom of speech,” first by giving a voice to profiles that had previously been silenced, and then by implementing technical and algorithmic solutions that make it possible to “solve” the problems people cite about harmful content on this social network, mainly fake news and fake profiles.
It is a kind of fundamentalist technological solutionism that posits that for any difficult problem, there must be a technical solution, overlooking the humanistic side.
- A long-term vision in which Twitter becomes a means to change the world order, not an end.
Musk and his backers want to use Twitter as an information-warfare tool to bring down the dollar and help usher in the “multipolar world.”
And indeed, it is incredibly important to control the information space if you want to alter the real world. As the world sinks ever deeper into war and economic chaos in 2023–2024, there are real (perceived) opportunities to promote cryptocurrencies and asset-backed tokens to replace the dollar.
For Dave Troy, Elon Musk is a sociopath, and all of this will end in disaster: he simply could not stand to see so many superficial and ill-informed analyses proliferate. So I have done everything possible here to set the record straight.
Ultimately, we are faced with the fact that social engineering through control of the information environment is an inevitable reality: the only question is who has the means and the moral authority to do it.
If democratically minded people do not take control of the information environment, powerful sociopathic autocrats will do so instead. We leave a power vacuum open at our own risk, and right now, Musk (and the occasional world leader like Putin) are the ones most willing to fill it.
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