Why don't you spend your money on what I want?
One of the funnier wails over Elon Musk's announced takeover of Twitter is the now-popular complaint that he could have used "his" (by which they mean "our") $44 billion to end world hunger or (insert pet cause here). I have my usual objection to the neverending quest of virtue-signallers to find a way to make other people pay for the sacrifices that will make them feel personally generous, but there's another idiocy about this complaint. For one thing, Musk hasn't spent the money yet, but for another, when he does, the money doesn't disappear. It just moves into the hands of all the people who used to own Twitter stock. All of those enlightened stockholders are free as a little blue bird to spend the money eliminating world hunger. Each of them can do his tiny part, or they can form a band of brothers and do it jointly.
Not that it's so easy to get a large group of people to march in lockstep toward the One True Goal for which their money is certified appropriate, but that sounds like an argument in favor of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few oligarchs. You can then hope they agree with you, or can be bullied into agreeing with you, or will submit to your confiscation their wealth for the one true certified worthy purpose.
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I am one of those, but I didn't have any particular good uses for his money in mind. I might not like his other choices for the money either. But sure, it's his. What I am pushing back on is conservatives thinking that this is going to go a long way to saving social media and turning back the tide of wokeness. I don't think it will do much. It will likely help in terms of Twitter, especially when a year from now it will be noticed by all but the true believers that Twitter is still functioning and the world hasn't ended.
But there are cultural changes underlying both the blessings and poisons of social media, vaster than a little unregulation can do.
If he finds out that his purchase didn't achieve what he hoped it would, I'm sure he'll be disappointed and will think of better ways to spend his money next time. It still won't be up to me or anyone else to dictate to him how to spend it.
All of those enlightened stockholders are free as a little blue bird to spend the money eliminating world hunger.
An excellent point. Surely the board members who were so opposed to Musk's purchase will donate the money they are paid for their Twitter shares. And even if they don't want to donate it all, surely they will donate at least their "excess" profit: the difference between what Musk is paying and the "real" share price.
I actually saw someone (on LinkedIn) saying that Musk should have used the money to pay off the national debt of Sri Lanka.
"But there are cultural changes underlying both the blessings and poisons of social media, vaster than a little unregulation can do.
This is true, but social media isn't going to go away, is it? So this is a step in the right direction to help establish social norms for how we think of and interact with this new, dangerous environment, just as man has done for all the other dangerous environments we've encountered over the millenia.
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