We're finally gonna have our free speech rights,
reimplemented now that one incredibly wealthy man,
in fact the most wealthy man on the planet will be the sole owner of twitter.
That's what people genuinely think.
And yes, it turns out that Elon musk has struck a deal with
the board over at twitter allowing him to purchase the company and
take it from being a publicly traded company to a private one.
Now, under the terms of the deal, shareholders will receive $54.20
in cash for each share of twitter stock they own Matching Musk's original offer.
And making a 38% premium over the stock price the day before,
Musk revealed his stake in the company.
Also, the deal which was unanimously approved by Twitter's board is
expected to close this year.
It comes after Musk revealed last week he had lined up $46.5 billion
dollars in financing to acquire the company.
An apparent turning point that forced Twitter's board to seriously
consider the deal.
Now, musk has come out with some statements about what
he plans to do with twitter and to be honest, some of it sounds pretty good.
But you should be skeptical because anyone who's under the assumption that
the richest man on the planet, being the sole owner of a company,
means that it's gonna be a great, wonderful free open forum.
You might get duped in the future.
But here's what he says, in his statement Monday, Musk said he wants to make
twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features,
including the algorithms open source to increase trust or
making the algorithms open source to increase trust.
Defeating the spam bots, which sounds really good and authenticating all humans,
which honestly, that also sounds very good.
Separately he said in a tweet Monday that he hopes even my worst critics remain on
twitter because that is what free speech means.
So look, my whole take on the free speech thing is I'm not buying it,
especially when we're dealing with book burnings at school districts
across the country where books that haven't even been assigned to
students are being banned from libraries across the country.
It's just fascinating that all the attention for the right wing,
including people like Elon Musk is, I want free speech on twitter.
I mean this it's an important, it's the public square.
If you really think it's the public square that make it a public utility, don't put
it under the control of one individual, particularly the richest man on the planet
might seem like he has other priorities in mind, but we'll see how this plays out.
I don't really have high hopes.
>> Okay, let me attack of this from a business perspective first and
then get to the content.
So he got 46 a half billion in financing, but
he only around 44 billion to buy it, only.
Thirty eight percent premium on the current price is literally irresistible.
Twitter was put in a situation where they almost legally had to sell
because if they didn't sell then they would face tons and tons of lawsuits
because that's your fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit.
And if somebody offers you thirty eight percent more than the shares are worth
then you'll pretty much have to sell if you're a public corporation.
So this was nearly inevitable once he decided to buy it.
I have to confess.
I mean I don't wanna encourage them at all.
But I was kinda surprised that the mega rich like MMusk and
Bezos etc haven't bought more media.
So Bezels bought Washington post.
They haven't like you haven't seen a lot of stories come out about how they're
doing pro Bezos or Amazon stories.
But what you don't see is the emissions,
is there a lot of tough stories against Amazon on Washington post?
I haven't seen him, right?
Is their skepticism when Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna pushed for
$15 minimum wage at amazon.
Yes.
Deep skepticism.
But to be fair, the Washington post was always conservative economically, right?
So but when in the case of Elon Musk so he can buy almost anything.
So he goes and buys this.
Now he could do almost anything with it especially because he's taking it private.
There's real legitimate business reasons taking private if you're gonna clean out
all the bots.
For example, the number of users you have is going to plummet.
If you're a public, the stock market would punish you deeply for
that because they like the the lying and the ruse inflated numbers.
Yeah, you gotta hit the 15% every year.
Every year. You gotta hit the 15% give
me more inflated numbers.
I don't care that they're fake.
They're obviously a giant number of fake accounts on twitter the most of
anywhere, right?
So in order to clean it up, you almost have to take it private, but
once you take it private, well then almost no one can see what you're doing.
He says there's gonna be transparency, but when the corporations private is usually,
well not usually, almost always less transparency.
So do you know that he won't rig the algorithms in favor of the right wing or
in favor of people that he supports or in favor of crypto boys, right?
And he does a lot of crypto stuff on not only the buying selling, but
he does a lot of what looks like manipulation.
I'm not saying this manipulation.
>> He's manipulating crypto currency through his tweets.
>> Through his tweets, let alone what appeared to be boxing spams on his side.
Box controls on his side.
Okay. But I don't know if he so
that has not been legally adjudicated.
That's why I say, I don't you can't be positive.
So now if he buys it and he actually does what he says in that tweet and
he authenticates everyone on twitter to be human beings and he gets rid of
the the spam bots, that would be awesome, we're here for it, right?
But the right wing does not have a good track record on hypocrisy or lying, right?
So now people say, Elon musk, I saw this all day today,
he's not necessarily right wing.
Really?
Okay.
Look, just a couple of years ago, Ben and I were joking around on one of our shows
old school and we did a poll Elon Musk, yes or no.
So just a couple of years ago, it was unclear, it was still a conversation and
debate, right?
Since then the last 23 years, has he ever said one left wing thing,
has he ever pissed off the right wing in any way, shape or form?
I've seen him say dozens, maybe hundreds of right wing stuff.
So, and in our experience, the right wing is filled with liars.
So you put out a statement like that, if you're a right winger,
it means you're gonna do the exact opposite.
You're gonna load up twitter with bots and they're all going to be for
your own financial benefit.
You're gonna manipulate everything in the world and then say up, nobody can see it,
trust me, I'm so good because I'm since I'm rich, that must mean I'm right.
And so the track record does not give you a lot of confidence that what he's
saying is true.
But if it is true, that part would be great.
>> I also think making vague statements about the importance of freedom of
speech is empty and doesn't really persuade me that you're on the side
of free speech when there are so many brazen republicans across the country.
As we're speaking, literally like they are violating constitutional rights,
because we're talking about the government violating constitutional rights.
I mean, Ron de Santis retaliating against Disney for
speaking out against the so called don't say gay bill in Florida, isn't it?
Disney's right to speak against legislation, they don't like, is it?
I mean, first of all,
I thought corporations were people who have protected free speech, right?
And if that's what the standard is based on the Supreme Court's ruling on
that issue, does Ron DeSantis as a member of the government and
the state legislature in Florida have the right to basically punish someone or
punish a company over its free speech.
>> So look, the right wing loves cancel culture.
>> They love it.
>> They love it, they do it all the time.
Or you say something against Israel will cancel all your contracts etcetera,
you do a protest of an oil pipeline will pass the laws thing.
People can run you over in the streets and murder you.
They love cancel culture, right?
But there are also massive hypocrites.
Almost every social media platform started by the right wing in the last five
years has said this is about freedom of speech and
the first thing they do is they ban anyone criticizing them.
True social Trump's platform, the same exact thing.
They're like, you're not allowed to criticize Trump on here.
What happened to free speech trump was President of the United States,
he was the government official criticizing the government is a very essence of
the First Amendment.
They're like, no, we meant you can't cancel our freedom of speech but
we're gonna cancel your freedom of speech left and right.
And then they said you can't criticize this,
you can't criticize that they've become cancel factories.
All those right wing social media plan.
>> And Elon musk hasn't spoken out against any of that.
He seems to be totally fine with it.
So this whole free speech narrative, I'm not buying it.
And the only honest, like the only place where I've seen him
be very specific is twitter banned Donald Trump.
Free speech violation.
Well look, you're taking a publicly traded company,
you're now making it private under your leadership, under your ownership.
And there's literally nothing standing in the way of you violating people's free
speech on twitter because there's no constitutional protection against it.
If people are serious okay, if they're not just saying it and
they're genuinely serious that they see twitter as the public
square where free speech should be valued and protected.
The only way to ensure that our constitutional rights of free
speech are applied to twitter is if it's a public utility and
it's treated as such, not a private corporation.
But that's not what's going to happen here.
Again, it's gonna be under the control of one individual, the richest individual.
And if anyone thinks that that leads to more freedom, I have a bridge to sell you.
I have many bridges to sell you.
Please give me your money.
>> Yeah. And in the last few things here, so
all the I'm free speech absolutist.
They love to say that, right?
Okay. But wait,
even if you take out the hypocrisy,
which you shouldn't because they never mean it, right?
But let's talk about what that means.
So there's two things that are of concern, no real person on
the left thinks you should ban speech because we don't like it.
By the way, that's let me retract it.
Some do.
But we're definitely not in that camp.
Okay.
And I think those people are totally extreme, right?
No, there's only two standards.
One is don't don't call for violence and two if you're a public figure.
If it's a lie that could get other people in danger etcetera.
Like what Trump did encouraging the riot on January 6th etcetera.
Now you can even have arguments around the edges on that for sure, okay?
Now is he's saying no, I don't care about those two categories, but hold on,
if you say that, what if somebody like trump said, hey, what,
the Jews are going to attack your children tomorrow and
they're gonna drink their blood, that's blood libel.
It's not like people haven't said it before, they've said it for centuries and
it's not like you and on doesn't say that powerful people in
the country are going to attack your children and drink their blood.
They literally say that, right?
So is he not going to ban that?
Is that gonna be okay to do on twitter now?
The worst, most odious lies you've ever seen in your life.
And then the second one is the one I tell you about Rebellion Pack all the time.
The person who runs it is Brianna Wuh,
she's actually one of the main victims of Gamergate.
So she was actually quoted in a lot of the stories today and
she makes a terrific point.
She's like, so are they going to allow rape threats again on twitter.
>> For sure I mean first of all,
like they barely even tried to get rid of the rape threats to begin with, but
do you think that any of that is gonna be moderated under Elon Musk's leadership?
Of course not, they don't care about that.
They never have, they never will.
But, the thing that I want to just really point out here is that there are two
different groups of people in this country.
There are people who are actually harmed by that kind of speech by those
kinds of threats because they don't have the resources to protect themselves.
They can't afford private security.
They can't afford the protection necessary to protect like the Posner
family who was targeted by Alex Jones and his lies about Sandy Hook.
I mean, they had to move seven different times and like they're lucky that they had
the resources to move to escape the threats that they were dealing with.
Elon Musk doesn't have to worry about his life being in danger.
If you have Q and on conspiracy theorists throwing all sorts of defamation and
libel in his direction, he's good, he's rich.
He's got his protection.
It's really the people who are usually harmed by all of these threats and all
of this so called speech that are probably gonna suffer the consequences of that.
>> You threaten a random woman or female journalist on twitter,
Elon Musk is definitely going to let that stand.
That's what he means by free speech absolutists.
If you threaten Elon Musk, is he gonna let that stand?
If instead of saying, hey, let's go rape a female journalist,
you said let's go rape Elon Musk.
Now, God don't say that, I don't want anybody saying that.
And then you gave his home address.
This is things that right wing did on a regular basis.
That's why social media started passing rules in the first place.
Hey, you're not allowed to docs,
you're not allowed to threaten violence like that.
Is Elon Musk gonna be like, yeah, threatened my family I don't mind?
Care, here's my address.
I don't mind.
I'm a free speech absolutist, zero percent chance he's going to allow that.
And then, so then you're gonna have an uneven field where he says you can do this
to those guys, but you can't do it to us.
But Hey, I would be super happy if he proved all of that wrong and
actually had balanced rules and showed us got rid of anonymity, which allows
people to put their hood on before they make comments and cleaned up twitter.
I'm super happy to come back on, look, I can prove it.
Tesla, they do electric cars.
I love that they do electric cars.
So you give me a good product and I'll tell you, hey, he did it, right?
But right now I wouldn't believe a word he's saying