The most dangerous thing about Elon Musk buying Twitter outright for $44 billion is the rapidly spreading notion that his controlling an influential social media platform is dangerous. It is, but not for any of the reasons his critics assert.
The current furor is dangerously misguided for two reasons. First, it assumes that one billionaire owning Twitter is significantly more harmful than a bunch of them owning it. And second, it worries that Musk is committed to an anarchic version of free speech that will undermine the health of our societies.
This is the equivalent of staring resolutely at a single tree to avoid noticing the forest all around it. The fact that so many of us now do this routinely suggests how far we already are from a healthy society.
Money is power. The fact that our societies have allowed a small number of individuals to accumulate untold riches means we have also allowed them to gain untold power over us. Debates, like the current one about the future of Twitter, are now rarely about what is in the interests of wider society. Instead, they are about what is in the interests of billionaires, as well as the corporations and institutions that enrich and protect this tiny, pampered elite.
Musk, as the richest person alive, may have a marginally stronger hand than other billionaires to push things in his direction. But more significantly, all billionaires ultimately subscribe to the same ideological assumption that society benefits from having a class of the super-rich. They are all on Team Billionaire.
Some are more "philanthropic" than others, using the wealth they have plundered from the common good to buy themselves today's equivalent of an indulgence - a ticket to heaven once sold by the Catholic Church for a princely sum. These "philanthropists" very publicly recycle their riches, while quietly claiming tax exemptions, to make it look as if they deserve their fortunes or as if the planet would be worse off without them.
And some billionaires are more committed to free speech than others, if only - as with the rest of us - by temperament. Certainly, it would be beneficial to have Twitter run using a transparent, open-source algorithm, as Musk says he wants, rather than the secretive algorithms increasingly preferred by the billionaires behind Google, Youtube, and Facebook.
Meritocracy race
But one thing the super-rich are not open to is the idea that billionaires should be a thing of the past, like slavery or the divine right of kings. Instead, they are all equally committed to their own ongoing power - and whatever planet-destroying economic model is required to sustain it.
And they are committed, too, to the idea that they should have much more power than the general population because they are supposedly the winners in a global meritocracy race. They believe they are better than the rest of us - that natural selection has selected them.
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