As Elon Musk continues to hint at a tender offer to takeover Twitter, Ripple’s chief technology officer, David Schwartz, has slammed the billionaire for his not so pure intentions.
Schwartz took to Twitter to disagree with Musk’s theory of how social media platforms should run, calling it “incredibly bad.”
Refuting Musk’s ‘free speech’ analogy, the LEDGER architect said, “You reward the side that has the most people with the most extreme views and you punish the side with the most people with extreme views.”
This is an incredibly bad policy that works absurdly poorly. It rewards unreasonable people and punishes reasonable people. And if there's one lesson to learn from economics, it's that people respond to incentives. 1/6 https://t.co/xF9zBCIoE2
— ?????????? ???????????????? (@JoelKatz) April 19, 2022
Musk’s free speech analogy flawed as per Ripple CTO
Schwartz further raised the root problem in social media moderation, calling Musk’s solution an ill-researched and ‘top of his head’ policy. The executive also accused the billionaire, adding, “He’s trying to push Twitter’s moderation policy to give better treatment to political speech he favors and to give worse treatment to political speech he disfavors.”
Previously, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had also signaled that Musk might be setting a wrong precedent with the Twitter bid. Buterin had said that while he doesn’t oppose Musk running Twitter, he disagrees “with the more generalized enthusiasm for wealthy people/orgs hostile-takeovering social media firms.”
In this regard, Dorsey opined that no individual or institution should own social media or media companies. Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer was also quick to take a dig at Musk, despite the latter being fondly called DOGEfather.
It takes some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to associate any type of "freedom" with the richest man in the world initiating a hostile takeover and forcing one of the largest public social media platforms private.
— Jackson Palmer (@ummjackson) April 14, 2022
But, there are supporters of Musk as well.
Mike Huckabee, Former Governor of Arkansas , “Whether Elon Musk ultimately buys Twitter, he’s done the world an invaluable service by forcing leftists to admit that Twitter & other social media outlets are biased & censorious…”
Tender offer incoming?
It was only last week that Elon Musk revealed his controversial $43 billion offer with the SEC to buy Twitter. His bid came days after he turned down a seat on the company’s board of directors
Even as the road to a Twitter takeover is long, the Tesla and SpaceX chief has added fuel to his bid from his latest ‘cryptic’ tweet.
_______ is the Night
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2022
Bloomberg speculated in its latest report that the missing word could be “” for the phrase “is the Night.”
