Welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. So how many days has it been since Elon

Mosca became the supreme leader of Twitter? How is it going so far? We are joined today by

Charlie Worsell, contributing right to the Atlantic, who writes the invaluable newsletter Galaxy

Brain about technology media and big ideas, also co-author of the book Out of Office. So Charlie,

welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for having me. So does Elon Musk have any idea what he's

gotten himself into? Short answer no. The short answer is no because it seems that, you know, I don't

want to take away from the fact that Elon Musk has built several successful companies and seems to

understand how to, you know, come up with a large concept idea and hire people who, you know,

are actual rocket scientists or car engineers and put those things into the world. Totally get that.

Content moderation, which is the sort of supreme thing that you do when you're the owner of a big

social platform that kind of controls a lot of the levers of politics and culture in America and

other places. Content moderation is extremely tricky. And the past, let's say 15 years of social media

is a series of, it's always dudes, dudes deciding that they have a really great idea to connect

people and to sort of promote discourse in a new and interesting way. And they create a platform.

And then people use these platforms in all kinds of ways. Some are great. Some are absolutely

nightmare-ish. And then these guys say, oh, oh, oh, oh, this isn't what we thought. And they struggle

with this sort of eternal question of not just the internet, but like discourse in general,

which is how do you balance free and open debate with maximum allowable speech? And the truth is

that it's extremely difficult. And then you throw in a business in the center of that. So, you know,

ad advertisers need for revenue. And it gets even more complicated. And Elon Musk has sort of

stumbled into this. I think he seems to think Twitter is a super fun thing that is kind of a,

it's a nice, you know, business card to have, right? And it's kind of fun. And he can be

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