Elon Musk Provides to Purchase Twitter: Reside Updates

This inventive tackle the Elon Musk-Twitter romance is an excerpt from columnist Joanna Stern’s weekly Tech Issues e-newsletter. You possibly can subscribe right here.

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The Tech Issues radio telescope intercepted the next transmission from outer area…

Expensive Elon,

We all know you had been instructed there’s no life on Mars however we’re right here, patiently awaiting your arrival. We repeatedly monitor knowledge feeds from Earth, and this week, we’re fairly puzzled.

Clearly, we perceive your investments in area. We perceive electrical vehicles. We perceive mind implants. We even have our personal fancy community of tunnels, and a model of your Hyperloop that goes about 3,000 of your Earth miles per hour. However Twitter? Why do you wish to personal a social-media firm?

In your SEC letter, the place you proposed shopping for all the firm for $54.20 a share, you stated: “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I’ll unlock it.” Excuse us, as we’re from one other planet, however do you imply unlock like one in every of your Tesla vehicles? Or unlock within the figurative sense, maybe as an interplanetary comm system?

Fortunately, we beamed into your TED interview on Thursday, the place you shared extra about your imaginative and prescient. It appears you’ve the next causes for eager to personal Twitter:

• Free speech: You stated “free speech” a handful of occasions within the interview. You need Twitter to be an “inclusive enviornment without spending a dime speech,” but in addition famous it must abide by the legal guidelines of speech in numerous international locations. (That would in the future embrace the Martian Invoice of Rights, too, proper?) However we’ve got many questions from up right here: How do you intend to cope with moderation and keep away from the pitfalls of different “free speech” apps? And how will you guarantee the photo voltaic system that you just wouldn’t abuse a megaphone you owned outright?

• Product fixes: We hear this Twitter isn’t one of the best. No tweet enhancing, opaque algorithms and extra. “It is essential that the algorithm be open-sourced and that any guide changes be recognized,” you stated within the interview. You additionally stated that if there have been an edit button, edited tweets would retain their earlier data, and that maybe retweets and likes would zero out with an edit. And as for placing an finish to bots, we couldn’t agree extra. (The Martian Robotic Wars had been not enjoyable.)

• Ardour: “The civilizational threat is decreased the extra we improve belief in Twitter as a platform.” Once more, we battle with the ideas however we do perceive that you just consider that this type of public discourse is essential to people like your self.

Nonetheless, with all of your different tasks, this looks like small bugs (a Mars dish like your potato, solely with extra legs) and a messy world to enterprise into. It is likely to be wiser so that you can stick to constructing earth’s largest rocket , in order that we are able to see you quickly.

On behalf of the entire Purple Planet’s residents,

Marty the Martian

P.S. There aren’t any bogs right here so that you’ll have to search out one other spot to do your tweeting.