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on monday twitter's board of directors
announced it had agreed to sell the
social media company to elon musk for
about 44 billion dollars
musk whose net worth of some 250 billion
dollars makes him far and away the
wealthiest person on earth
says he intends to restore free speech
to the platform so what does he mean by
that exactly and why are so many people
worried about it
nbc business and technology
correspondent joe lane kent has our
sunday focus
in typical elon musk fashion it took off
with a tweet
on april 14th the richest person in the
world posted this i made an offer more
than two weeks later and one so-called
poison pill attempt by the board to
thwart the sale twitter accepted
twitter co-founder and ex-ceo jack
dorsey endorsed his fellow billionaire
calling musk the singular solution he
trusts
if approved musk will take the company
private forking over 44 billion dollars
and if the deal goes through he would
become the most indebted ceo in the us
however the self-described free speech
absolutist insists that owning twitter
which now has 229 million daily users is
not about the cash flow
my
strong intuitive sense is that
having a public platform that is
maximally trusted
um and and and
broadly inclusive
um
is extremely important
to the future of civilization but you've
described yourself i don't care about
the economics at all
instead his focus is on what he calls
free speech saying it's the bedrock of a
functioning democracy and twitter is the
digital town square well i think it's
very important for
there to be
an inclusive arena for
free speech he plans to add new features
making the algorithms open source to
increase trust defeating the spam bots
and authenticating all humans having
tweets sort of mysteriously be promoted
and demoted
with no insight into what's going on i
think this can be quite dangerous but
some of his critics see musk as the
danger pointing to his controversial
tweets about white nationalism unions
taxes and beyond questioning his ability
to properly handle disinformation and
toxic content especially if he takes the
company private let's talk about the
freedom of speech here i mean he says
he's dedicated to freedom of speech his
critics say he's dedicated to allowing
hate and violence to spread on the
platforms
what's the reality here in the reality
only must-knows and i think when you
look at twitter platform in terms of
hate in terms of some of the horrific
things that we've seen on it i mean
there's potential here that it just
invites more of a political firestorm
from us
and since his takeover bid musk hasn't
stopped tweeting from jokes about buying
coca-cola next and putting the cocaine
back in to mocking twitter's top legal
and policy officer
he doesn't appear to worry about a new
sec filing that prohibits him from
tweeting disparaging things about the
company he's set to own
how much is elon going to infuse his
values and his personalities into this
company well quite a lot you could see
he has an opinion on everything he uses
it for marketing he uses it for personal
enjoyment he uses it to troll people you
can see that all within a 24-hour period
with elon musk musk and twitter have
until october 24th to finalize the deal
what does twitter look like under elon
musk in five years i think he'll take it
public and within that time if he
manages to turn it around in a
significant way and make it a great
business i think he'll take it public
and then he will declare victory and fly
off to mars and then we'll never see him
again for sunday today jolene kent los
angeles
among the questions for musk will be
whether to allow former president trump
back onto twitter trump was suspended
from the platform for his posts
following the january 6 attack on the
capital and though he says he's not
interested the former president may look
to return if he decides to run again in
2024
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