Bari Weiss Warns Against ‘Handful of Unelected’ Tech Giants Wielding Such Vast Power Over Discourse — Including Elon Musk

Bari Weiss has written an essay about her work on the “Twitter Files” in which she offers numerous reflections about Twitter’s old regime, the power of the tech giants over information, her observations on Elon Musk, and what it means to the company and everyone else now that the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire controls the platform.

Weiss posted her thoughts at her Substack site The Free Press, starting with what it was like when she, Matt Taibbi, and others were recruited by Musk to investigate Twitter’s internal archives.

As she and her colleagues examined what was going on at Twitter before Musk’s takeover, Weiss raised the question of why he was motivated to buy Twitter for $44 billion despite all of the drama involved in the acquisition process.

Weiss nodded to Musk’s oft-stated goals of ending censorship and the suppression of conservatives while restoring Twitter to a purer state of free speech. Since Musk has been overhauling Twitter after taking the helm, Weiss offered a number of confessions from the Twitter CEO, mostly about the price he paid to acquire a social media platform that he looked at like a highly-dysfunctional “activist organization.”

From the essay:

Musk estimates that he paid at least twice what it was worth but that he had to “chew down this hairball”—which is to say, he had to buy Twitter.

The price tag isn’t his only grievance. There’s also the fact that the company, to hear him tell it, wasn’t really a functioning company at all.

When Musk took over, he said, he found Twitter in disarray. Employees had unlimited vacation time and permanent work from home. The company had stopped doing performance reviews altogether, according to a long-time Twitter employee. “As long as Twitter could just keep its head above water and be roughly cash-flow break-even, then that’s all that they cared about,” Musk said.

Musk calls the Twitter he purchased a “non-profit.” Twitter, as it existed, wasn’t pursuing net earnings but “social influence,” he said. “This was fundamentally an activist organization.”

Since he took the helm at Twitter, he has fired 80 percent of the staff. He has insisted that those not prepared to be “extremely hardcore” and work “long hours at high intensity” show themselves out. Several engineers I spoke to had been working 18-hour days for the past month. They looked like it.

“It’s like if an aircraft was going in one direction and then suddenly pulled a U-turn and hit the afterburners in the other direction. That’s what happened to Twitter,” Musk said, making a vroom noise and laughing.

She also made a broader point about the ways in which a “handful of unelected people at a handful of private companies can influence public discourse profoundly.” She encompassed in that not just the actions Twitter took in censoring the New York Post‘s article or exercising their moderation tools to ban people including Donald Trump, but Musk’s newfound power to use those same tools.

Musk just exerted that authority by shutting down the Twitter user who was using publicly available information to track his private plane, Weiss noted that this bears its own set of connotations.

She noted that Musk doesn’t “move and think as one” with the other “unelected” powers at tech companies the way the prior regime at Twitter did, but pointed out that whereas old Twitter was trying to please a whole group of people, it now answers to the “morals and mores” of just one man: Musk.

Weiss questioned whether anyone, Musk included, should have such vast control over public discourse.

Just yesterday, news broke of Twitter banning @ElonJet, an account with half a million followers that tracked the movements of his plane. Musk justified it by saying, “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” and noted that a stalker recently climbed onto a car carrying his young son. Another answer could simply be: I own Twitter. My platform, my rules.

Much more seriously, Musk has business interests in China. Could he wind up suppressing information negative to China to please the CCP? Old Twitter was moderated by the morals and mores of one group. Now it is moderated by the morals and mores of one man.

If I took anything away from my week at Twitter, it’s about power. It’s about how a handful of unelected people at a handful of private companies can influence public discourse profoundly.

They can do it because of how good the tools they made are—and how little the public understands them. They can influence the outcome of elections. And they do.

Because all of those people tend to move and think as one, there is something refreshing about Musk barging into the Twitter Tower on Market Street and turning over the tables. But I’m not sure anyone should have that kind of power.

At one point I asked Musk what he makes of this criticism — that just as the old guard at Twitter had too much power, so does he.

“I’m open to ideas,” he said.

Read the rest here.