What Elon Musk's Twitter Bid Says About 'Extreme Capitalism'
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2022
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Lepore, a Harvard professor and New Yorker writer, is host of the podcast The Evening Rocket, where she examines what she calls Musk's extravagant, "extreme" capitalism — where stock prices are driven by earnings, and also by fantasies.
NPR's Bobby Allyn also explains Twitter's effort to prevent Musk from gaining control of the company.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, so a billionaire wants to buy a company. |
| 0:09.8 | What's the big deal? |
| 0:10.8 | Well, I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech, |
| 0:19.4 | where all, yeah, so yeah. |
| 0:22.4 | Elon Musk appeared at last week's Ted Conference in Vancouver where he was asked why he put |
| 0:28.2 | a $43 billion offer on the table for Twitter. |
| 0:33.1 | Musk said he wanted Twitter's code to be public. |
| 0:36.5 | Also, he says he thinks Twitter has too many rules when it comes to what you get to say |
| 0:40.6 | on the platform. |
| 0:41.8 | The company has policies against certain forms of hate speech and disinformation, and |
| 0:46.9 | Musk thinks that users should be able to quote, speak freely within the bounds of the law. |
| 0:53.3 | The Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so. |
| 0:58.2 | The thing is, it's not a town square where most people are. |
| 1:02.8 | According to Pew Research, fewer than 30% of adults in the US say they even use Twitter. |
| 1:09.8 | And about that free speech argument to allow all legal speech, you would have to allow all |
| 1:15.7 | spam to stay up on the platform. |
| 1:17.7 | You would have to allow all pornography to stay up on the platform, all forms of hate speech. |
| 1:22.4 | It couldn't make the platform functionally unusable. |
| 1:26.4 | Kate Klannick with St. John's University in New York focuses on private governance of |
| 1:30.7 | online speech. |
| 1:32.2 | And Klannick told NPR that Musk's offer to buy Twitter underscores how when it comes to |
| 1:38.2 | speech on the internet today, money is power. |
... |
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