And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market. Existing regulations, powerful existing lobbies and de-facto monopolies mean we should strive towards a complex balance.
I personally believe that freedom of association is an important part of the First Amendment and while I think that Musk has a thin skin and is abusing his power to censor his employees, I also think he has the right to do that. But at the same time, it's ridiculous for anyone concerned about public censorship to compare entirely personal blocklists to firing someone from a company or banning them from a place of business.
Musk has (some) right to censor people at his companies and he has a lot of right to choose who he does business with, but I also have the right to call him a hypocrite whenever he waxes poetic about censorship ruining people's livelihoods, as if your boss firing you because of a Twitter post is somehow worse or in any way different than your boss firing you or denying you severance pay because of a public blog post.
> And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market.
If you think that Twitter should have different rules because it's big, then the answer to that is to either break it up or nationalize it. Certainly, the answer to "this thing is too big to be bound to the whims of one elite person" is not to privatize it under one elite person.
Yes, it could be. Need to read the rest of the article to know whether it was merited or not. Elon has done lots of scummy things (Tesla battery swap scam for one).
> and that you have to serve a customer who treats you like that
You don't have to, but when you are pretending to be the paragon of free speech, it is an important data point.