> It's really none of your business what someone does with their own money.

Then don't you think people shouldn't have so much money that they can literally control society? What a facile stance.

Musk doesn't control society, neither does twitter. If electrifying the cars of the western world affords someone the insane wealth required to... buy an internet forum... that seems like a fairly reasonable level of control over capital allocation to me.

I never stated anything about "complete control of society", I am merely making the point that money is essentially an abstraction of power and that modern society does nothing to prevent that, maybe it even is built to amplify that. Accordingly, to say "it's none of your business what others do with their money" is to say "it's none of your business how others use their power", and if you can't see how it's pretty directly everyone's business what everyone else does in our shared world, I think you and I understand ethics a little differently.

Edit: parent comment cleanly and completely changed due to my response, what a world. Cowards.

So what you're trying to say is that Trump Social should clone a load balancer or two and migrate to Postgres

Musk doesn't have enough money to literally control the society.

If controlling twitter means literally controlling society, then I hope he crashes and burns that whole affair. That much power should never be concentrated into a single corporation.

I'm more talking about lobbying and the pernicious effects of a legal system modifiable by the elites. You can surely see that the rich and elite in society have written tax laws, property (IP, copyright) laws, employment laws, and complicated everything enough that the legal system is pretty directly pay to win.

I think the online giant platforms are another problematic avenue of control, I don't object to that characterization, but I'm really saying that saying "other's money is none of your business" can't be a good-faith statement in a world where money can control livelihoods and laws with such ease.

> but I'm really saying that saying "other's money is none of your business" can't be a good-faith statement in a world where money can control livelihoods and laws with such ease.

It absolutely can. I have no problem with the fact that money can buy politicians.

I have a problem with the fact that politicians can be bought in the first place.

Which are 2 completely different issues. If you had loads of money, you’d play the game too.

Then we’re “playing the game” by caring how he spends his money and trying to use social pressure to force changes in law. You can’t simultaneously say Musk should be able to do what he wants because he can, and then tell others that they need to behave differently.

Well, you can, but it’d be massively hypocritical and an opinion that’s easily dismissed

Oh, come now. It’s not our business if he uses his money to outright purchase a politician? It’s not our business if he uses his money in pursuit of The Most Dangerous Game? It’s not our business if he uses his money to run disinformation campaigns via social media? Of course it is very clearly our business what he does with his money.

If anything, we should not only be scrutinizing the hell out of Musk’s stated intentions, but also scrutinizing those people in the Twitter organization who have the power to manipulate the public message, and ensuring that there are checks in place to keep falsehoods and anti-democracy messaging out of social media.

I mean, really, “mind your business!”? So let’s pretend it’s some other mega-billionaire, shall we? We sure has hell don’t want the likes of Putin purchasing twitter, do we? Give your head a shake.

Edit: ah, shit, I see later in the thread you double down. What a waste of my time. Don’t bother responding, IDGAF.