It has struggled to monetise its estimated 330m users and it hasn’t managed to construct the same kind of micro-targeted ad systems that have made Facebook and Google so powerful.
Musk is perhaps the greatest entrepreneur of the last two decades. He may well see ways of refining and reshaping its model so that it finally starts to make some serious money.
And yet the more interesting question is this. Can he shift it politically? There is no question about whether that is part of the agenda.
“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” argued Musk, ironically in a tweet, only last month. “What should be done?”
It was a good question and is all the more pressing now that he is its biggest single shareholder.
Of course, you can debate whether Twitter, along with the other big social media sites, has any inbuilt political bias. The company published its own research last year concluding that, if anything, centre-Right politicians and commentators are given slightly more prominence by its algorithms than those from the Left.
Anyone who has ever used it, however, will find that very hard to believe. The real problem is that it promotes a kind of angry, emotive, self-righteous, virtue signalling that automatically favours the Left, and pushes aside the more reflective, considered views that might favour the Right.
Its coding is purpose-built to create a confected outrage in which the state always has to intervene, taxes always have to be raised, and anyone who questions the Left-liberal consensus, no matter how batty, is instantly torn apart by a baying mob public-shaming their opponents into submission.
If that isn’t a bias, it is hard to know what is, and it is all the more insidious for being undeclared.
Musk’s politics are slightly obscure and hardly coherent. In fairness, he is probably too busy making cars to spend his days re-reading Hayek and Rawls to debate the finer points of political theory.
And yet, insofar as they can be pinned down, he leans towards the libertarian Right. He has shifted Tesla’s HQ from high-tax California to low-tax Texas.
He has designed his planned Mars colony as an anarchical direct democracy free from any form of state. And, of course, he is part of the “PayPal Mafia” led by Peter Thiel, probably the most influential, and certainly the richest, conservative libertarian in the US.
