Elon Musk announced yesterday that he’d be voting Republican in the forthcoming US midterms, which will, it is fair to say, not enhance his popularity with his prospective twitter employees:
WOW! Elon Musk says he will be voting Republican this election & explains how he wants algorithm transparency for Twitter. pic.twitter.com/yDCKBCHLuD
— An0maly (@LegendaryEnergy) May 17, 2022
In many ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, Musk has wondered aloud in recent weeks about whether twitter is “too left wing”. How many good, progressive, Democratic voters wonder whether that is the case?
Musk clarifies, in the clip above, that he’s voted for Democrats almost exclusively for most of his adult life – again, this is hardly surprising for anybody familiar with the culture of silicon valley. And there’s no evidence that Musk is, particularly, a conservative: he made an eyebrow raising pledge a week or so ago that he would pay the costs of any of his employees who needed to travel to get an abortion, should the procedure be criminalised in any US state where his employees work, following the likely reversal of Roe v Wade. He’s big on drug decriminalisation, too. He doesn’t fit the stereotypical profile of a Republican.
So, what gives?
The likeliest explanation for all of this is simply that… he’s sincere. He, like a growing number of liberal-minded people, is alienated by the oppressive conformity of liberal discourse, the banning of people with different views, the shouting down of opponents, and so on.
Musk is a capitalist. In fact, he’s indisputably, by now, the most successful capitalist of all time, in terms of creating wealth for himself and others. He presumably instinctively believes that the key to being a success in business, as an entrepreneur, is to have an idea that everybody else thinks is a bit mad, until it is not. After all, he’s made billions of dollars from SpaceX – a company founded on the idea that people should be able to pay to take a holiday to Mars. That idea may have struck people as borderline insane, when he articulated it. And it still hasn’t come to fruition. What it has done, though, is create a business worth tens of billions of dollars that is achieving things in commercial space flight that nobody thought possible twenty years ago.
In other words, he knows better than almost anybody alive that the maddest ideas are sometimes, in fact, genius.
So it follows, then, that he would be instinctively hostile to those who want to shout down some ideas, whatever their merits.
And unfortunately, if you share that kind of hostility to censorship, and it’s your main issue… you kind of have to vote for Republicans, at least in the United States. Who do you vote for in Ireland? Mattie McGrath, I guess.
The voting part aside, take note of what he says about his plans for twitter in the clip above. He says he wants twitter to be “balanced” and to ditch things like “shadowbanning” and the boosting and deboosting of certain tweets. That’s very welcome: His dream of a platform where everybody engages openly with ideas from the other side is a pipe dream, but one of the things that he could do is ensure that properly good ideas from either side aren’t interfered with.
Liberals should welcome that, by the way. If some person is getting millions of likes for a position you find repulsive, it’s probably smarter in the long run to face that reality head on than to simply de-boost the tweet and try to hide it from people. It would help a lot if we had a true marketplace of ideas, simply so we could all stop pretending that our own ideas would be massively popular if it wasn’t for the twitter censors.
That applies to the right, too, by the way: It’s very easy to retreat into a conspiracy bubble and believe that the nation would turn to you and your ideas if it wasn’t for the villains in silicon valley keeping you from being heard. Take that factor out of the equation, and some people on “our” side might suddenly have to face the fact that some of the things they believe are just plain, organically, unpopular.
Anyway, I continue to believe that Musk’s takeover, on balance, is a net plus. But for his own sake, he probably shouldn’t have announced that he plans to vote for the hated Republicans. His biggest problem is, and will continue to be, twitter employees. They won’t like this at all, bless ‘em