By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times
It might be more accurate to say that Mr. Musk himself is out of control and his enormous wealth makes him more dangerous than others in the super-rich category.
His eccentric behavior as the new owner of Twitter has caused some of his detractors to question his mental stability. Whoever dreamed that a $44 billion purchase of controlling interest in such a high-tech enterprise would become what now appears to have become the plaything of a petulant man-child?
Thousands of jobs at Twitter are hanging in the balance as the new owner’s strange impulses tell him to conduct subscriber polls on major questions involving the future of his company.
Perhaps the scariest such result was the “landslide” vote of 51 percent of the Twitter followers who said they favored letting a former president rejoin their happy band. To his credit, No. 45 has declined to do so.
In my view, Musk likely believes that Twitter is too big to fail and that he answers to no one. If that really is the case, I suggest he do some reading about great companies that jumped or were thrown off the high-rise buildings on Wall Street.
That reading list could start with names like Enron, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, TWA, Kodak, Pan Am, Blockbuster, and the list goes on and on. The other folks who own stock in Twitter may fear – with good reason – that their investments are circling the drain.
Based on what Musk has said and done thus far with his powerful new toy, our nation could be in for a horrific barrage of hate speech, crazier conspiracy theories, and public misinformation on a scale we cannot imagine.
He reminds me of Nero, the goofy Roman emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. But Musk won’t need a fiddle. He’ll just send tweets.
(Contact Keith at keithkappes@gmail.com).