Op-Ed: How Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter could threaten free speech
A week after Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, stepped down, his company laid out a roadmap for how it plans to bring users back. Twitter will try to make the site as attractive as possible to users who have quit—but, critics warn, it will do so by erasing tweets.
In a story published in Fast Company, Musk detailed his vision for how he envisions Twitter going forward. But it has implications for free speech and how the social network is run.
“I know that many of you have left Twitter partly and partly because of the platform’s limitations,” Musk said in a short interview at his new company, Neural Kinetics. “That’s why I’m going to make it even greater than it is now.”
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has faced criticism for his decision to take a long leave from his companies, which have been embroiled in criticism after he revealed he wanted to use Twitter to try, and ultimately failed, to fly on the “Boeing 787” that he thought would revolutionize and save the aviation industry.
“My Twitter account is like a personal journal. I wrote a tweet when I had a rough day and I can go back and read it like I did as a teenager,” Musk said. “I can tell you how I felt. I can tell you what I did.”
Musk added, “It’s not like I didn’t have a public Twitter account. It was just not very public. I had just a couple of tweets out.”
Neural Kinetics, the start-up Musk is now serving as CEO of, has three core products: a brain-teaser game, an app that creates 3-D objects, and an AI called “Ava,” which is designed to learn how to use machine learning.
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