Not sure he lied. I think he fooled himself into thinking that moderating a social media platform can be done on a rose-tinted ideological basis. Then reality hit, and the fact is, there are so many edge-cases that being ideologically consistent is almost impossible.

Moderation is hard. And it matters, both to keep audiences & advertisers. Besides, First Amendment-based moderation is not even possible for an international company. Most of Europe have strict laws on holocaust-denial. Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.

..etc, etc..

>Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.

The UK may technically have some old law on the books stating this but it's never enforced. I mean, the Sex Pistols ("God save the queen... A fascist regime...") demonstrated this quite convincingly.

I did hear about someone getting arrested for yelling at Prince Andrew in a funeral procession, but that was for breach of the peace during a funeral and (importantly) was thrown out in court.

Growing up, I saw plenty of posters with words like "The great Royal debate: should we hang them, or should we shoot them?" and no one cared in the slightest.

The UK royal family has pretty wide control over what can and cannot be said about them in the media.

There is for instance, many stories about royal improprieties that have been covered up in recent years, in exchange for “juicy” Harry & Meghan stories being circulated in their place. This is probably at the core of the schism within the royal family. I can read about it, because I’m not in the UK. Bet it’s not very well covered in the UK though.

Because he's always been an insecure child, who says what he thinks will make him popular or stand out to a group of acolytes. Sometimes that'll work for a while, sometimes it'll really help, but over time you get more cocksure, more convinced of your own greatness and more foolish.

My wife always thought him to be a jerk. I thought he was a visionary. Twitter has proven my wife was correct

He can be both.

I don’t think he lied. I don’t think it’s even hypocrisy - he just put very little thought into his previous belief and changed his mind.

He’ll do it again later. That’s why you shouldn’t believe what he says. It’s _not_ that he’s _lying_ - he believes what he says when he says it - he just has no care for consistency and will change his mind whenever it looks prudent, without regard for others.

I am not defending this. It may have helped him to business success in the past, but it is severely damaging to interpersonal relationships. It is a terrible way to live a life.

> he just put very little thought into his previous belief and changed his mind.

The sad thing is he'd probably only need to sit down and read a dozen or so books in order to figure out how to make Twitter actually successful, but you know he's going to be too lazy to ever actually do this.

He has repeatedly shown a proclivity for lying, so I don't know why it should be ruled out altogether. And regardless of what the intent or driving motivation was, it's still hypocrisy.

I'd only accuse someone of hypocrisy if they did one thing while saying another simultaneously.

If someone changes their mind that's not hypocrisy. I want to stick to that definition because to do otherwise seems to be to be disapproving of people's ability to change their mind. People changing their mind is necessary for the political process to work (and for society and friendship in general!)

Elon Musk might indeed be a hypocrite, but I don't think he's necessarily being hypocritical in this case. If he _continues_ to harp on about freedom of speech on Twitter while keeping this policy in place that will be hypocritical though.

[Edit: I'm not trying to defend Musk in general. I think the facts of the current situation, and things he's done in the past, are pretty terrible!]

It turns out he's just everything his critics has said he is, and that he is indeed just following his preexisting standard of behavior. That's just how it is sometimes.

He lied because it's way more noble to be a "champion of free speech" than a champion of hate speech and far-right rhetoric. Much of the base that buys into this rhetoric hates complexity or nuance. "Unrestrained freedom" is an easy concept to promote, yet impractical to apply rationally, something that those who fully buy into the concept fail to comprehend, as they only subscribe to a surface-level understanding.

> he just lied. But why?

Why not? Lying is cool, fun, makes people like you if you tell them what you want to hear, and even profitable. You can really inflate your stock values by simply lying about what you can achieve. It's not like there will be any negative consequences to this behavior.

A pathological liar is lying, I wonder why.

I think the answer here is that he has no idea what he's doing and is making it up as he goes.

> he just lied. But why?

Because lying helped further his narrative in the public which is advantageous to him. Similar to how he lied for years about FSD.

What is FSD?

Full Self-Driving, aka Tesla's autopilot.

"Full Self Driving".

Or perhaps more damning, since FSD was a prediction which are notoriously hard, he lied about his academic credentials and immigration status for decades, which is harder to excuse.

I don’t know if he lied or not but I get the impression he doesn’t have any particular plan, and is just doing / saying whatever comes to mind at any given moment. Who knows, but from the outside it comes across that way.

I've been wondering whether he's planning to run for some office (in South Africa? US?). At least, that would make his burning through $44Bn, lying so much and voluntarily antagonizing/ostracizing "the Libs" somewhat logical.

I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but that's a little close.

Buying Twitter would be a strategic campaign move.

Of course a lot of people now realise he's an asshole, and he's likely to lose a lot of money on the deal. So maybe that plan won't work out.

It's been a real case study in self-harm. Many who were neutral or positive before - because of Tesla, SpaceX, and some of his other projects - are now varying shades of hostile.

And he's unlikely to win over the fascist vote, because Flynn is going to have that locked up when he emerges from behind Trump's shadow.

> I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but that's a little close.

One of the few requirements to become US president is that you must be a natural born citizen. So Musk is out, as he’s born in Pretoria, South Africa and neither of his parents were US citizens.

https://www.usa.gov/election

To be president, but plenty of other government positions.

I doubt Musk would be interested in a mere government position where he has to act on the orders of a boss. Very few of those are open to elections in the first place, so he probably could have one if he just wants it. Apart from having a conflict of interest that would probably bar any reasonable president from offering one.

If he runs for office in the US, he may run for governor, but he can't run for president. On the other hand, there are many countries that have less stringent regulations, plus he may run in South Africa.

But that's a wild guess. I introduced this speculation in the thread but for all we know, he's just really bad at handling frustration and that's how it manifests.

He would never run for office in South Africa, where he has no remaining serious ties, no support base, and no popularity amongst the general population.

Ted Cruz (Republican senator from Texas) comes up for re-election in 2024. Couple of remarks about Cancun every time the weather gets a bit chilly, update some of the fun memes from the 2016 presidential primary... and maybe Cruz himself is considering another go at the White House.

Or perhaps that was the situation at the beginning of this year, and one of Musk's motivations for moving to Texas, beyond his previously-stated ones.

I don't think there's any 4D chess going on here with Twitter.

He signed the deal when the market was way up. He was probably riding high and overconfident on his wealth. The market corrected, his wealth dropped and he tried damn hard to get out of the deal. Turns out the deal was hard to get out of so he's trying to make the best of it.

I think he's earnestly trying to make Twitter successful and profitable. This is just his best effort.

That's entirely possible.

If it's the case, it's just... sad.

Because he's our generation's P.T. Barnum

He’s thrown in as a movement conservative. You could tell because what he described as infringements on freedom of speech weren’t just wrong but consistently inaccurate matching the ways they were portrayed in the right-wing media.

I’m not sure what galvanized him but have wondered whether it is as simple as the transgender rumors (Grimes, his daughter) being true. Given his wealth it’d be natural for him to be a low tax/regulation Republican but he’s clearly way more motivated by the culture war and the QAnon end at that. Taking this as a personal affront would explain him being so willing to risk everything else just to hurt the people he sees as enemies.

I'd point out his positions are reactionary, not conservative. He doesn't want to preserve an existing state of affairs, he wants to counter recent progressive movements. The old guard politician from Chesterton's fence, the prototypical conservative in my mind, would view someone who wanted to put the fence back up, after the matter has been exhaustively litigated and the fence taken down, as just as if not more foolish than the politician who had wanted to take it down without understanding.

You are just describing the current US conservative party...

The Republican Party are distinct from the concept of conservative and reactionary politics. They practice both. As do the Democratic Party for that matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary

(See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism)

It's useful to tease these concepts apart so we can better understand & critique certain policy positions. When Democrats vocally oppose student loan forgiveness, they are practicing conservative politics, for instance. It's not simply that Republicans are reliably conservative and Democrats are reliably progressive.

And there are many other forms of politics, these are just the most prevalent in US politics today.

>"The Republican Party are distinct from the concept of conservative and reactionary politics."

Conceptually, yeah. In reality, it's the "conservative" party and they practice "reactionary" politics.

Fair point. Common usage of those terms is definitely muddled.

I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I believe the explanation is that Musk is a fascist. Fascism is notoriously difficult to define, but what I mean here is that Musk ultimately believes only in the will to power; all stated principles will ultimately be abandoned at the time when they conflict with his will to gain & maintain power. You can compare this to Trump; Trump excoriated Clinton over her handling of classified information wrt her email server, but not only did many Trump administration officials (including his children) make similar mistakes, but we've seen with the document scandal that he had no regard for classified information when it suited him to keep them in an unlocked closet space. (This is not to defend Clinton; I have no interest in doing so.)

So Musk talked about being a free speech absolutist, until such a time as he felt threatened by it. The only thing Musk actually believes is that he is the most deserving person to wield power, and because he the most deserving, anything he does in support of that is justified. He can justify it by saying, I'm making humanity an interplanetary species, and in doing so I will save billions of lives.

(He won't make us an interplanetary species, his plans for colonizing Mars are gibberish, nothing he does is truly justified.)

>he just lied. But why?

People are gullible. It was pointed out by many parties the various ways he had suppressed the speech of others over the years, especially of his workers. Yet just because Elon Musk said he was for free speech, people believed him. Yet it would be unreasonable to expect somebody who doesn't especially value speech in the workplace to make twitter more pro-speech. Musk is not some civil libertarian.

I think honestly the history of social media is sites which started out with close to a policy of free speech absolutism slowly changing as cracks appeared. Jack Dorsey is gone, Aaron Schwartz is dead, Zuckerberg is in decline. The experiment already happened and speech gradually became more and more curtailed.

The only remotely plausible explanation that isn't plain narcissism on Elon's part is the hypothesis I found on Matt Levine's blog (which he credited to someone I forget): Elon, by positioning himself as a conservative, hopes to convince Republicans to buy Teslas (and his other products).

There are a variety of problems with that approach — not least that he'd be aiming for the primary targets of oil company propaganda.

Alternative possibility (which, to clarify, is just a random idea of mine, not even a hunch): he sees himself as some sort of political figure, either as a candidate or as a kingmaker – just the position that, if I understand correctly, Trump has lost a few weeks ago.

For that kind of use, owning Tweeter, with absolute control on content and a user base stoked up on anger against "the Libs", "the pedophiles", "the establishment", "the deep state", etc. would be invaluable.

as the parent said, look into the personalities and games played by dictators over the last 120 years. maybe common threads.

Musk has a long track record of lying about his intentions and his products prospects. It appears he plays the part of an authentic well intentioned engineer whose principles and good sense override his politeness, well enough to fool a huge number of people.

I don't think Musk calculated that much, but a lot of people who cheered for Musk "because he was for free speech," are still cheering for Musk because... whatever. Because it's his company now and he can do whatever he wants and that's good?

(I mean, just skim through this whole comment thread.)

So, in the end, it doesn't matter whether he was for absolute free speech or not. At least not to Musk. And a lot of Musk fans.

Asking why he lied is like asking why the clouds rained on you. This is exactly the same mistake people make with Trump: you think he’s actually a human being who feels emotions and responds to them like the rest of us. But he’s really a sociopathic narcissist. They aren’t like us; they are purely driven by the drive for adulation and attention, and their lives as presented to us are fictional to the extent that they can get away with it.

Lying leads to anger, and anger leads to engagement.

For some reason, most online communities appear to be fueled by stimuli that are exact opposite of what we find in healthy real life communities. It seems difficult to grow a social network with just positive feedback.

Because you would have never supported him if he told the truth.