Elon Musk’s Fight for Freedom on Socials

CLAY: It is Tax Day. A lot of people are cutting checks that are painful to cut today. A lot of people also not cutting checks at all because they’re a part of nearly — I think the number is — 60% of Americans, Buck, are not going to pay any federal income taxes at all today. One guy who is I believe paying potentially the largest tax bill in the history of the United States, Elon Musk, who sold some of his Tesla stock, and — as a result — is in line to a monster tax bill.

And one of the things that has been intriguing over weekday — we’ve talked a lot about this free speech battle that has emerged over whether or not Elon Musk is going to be able to purchase Twitter. Twitter stock, by the way, as we speak right now, up about $1.50. They implemented the poison pill on Friday to try to keep Elon Musk from taking control of the company.

And over the weekend, Elon Musk fired away, fired off several different tweets relating to that battle, and I saw this, and I was kind of stunned by it, Buck. Jack Dorsey, who was the longtime CEO of Twitter, also was a cofounder. He said that the board of which he is a member has, quote, “consistently been the dysfunction of the company.”

He also said “the plots and coups of the Twitter board could be made into a Hollywood thriller one day,” and earlier in the day another capitalist who was quoted for saying “good boards don’t create good companies but a bad board will kill a company every time.” Jack Dorsey responded, “Big facts.” And then he was asked by a Twitter user if he’s allowed to say these things about the Twitter board, and he simply responded “no.” (chuckles)

So all of this was happening, of course, on Twitter. There’s an outstanding $54.20 offer from Elon Musk. So far, no competing bid that has emerged. And Buck you sent — and all this is so fascinating because the Washington Post and the New York Times and all these companies that are owned by billionaires — memorably the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos — are arguing, “Oh, my goodness, can you imagine if Twitter is owned by a billionaire and he has the ability to say and do what he thinks is right for this company?”

The hypocrisy staggering because their companies are if he came out owned by billionaires as well, and there is a monster debate that has ensued by First Amendment, free speech who can and cannot be permitted to say what they think. Buck, do you think that Elon Musk is going to be ultimately successful here or do you think the forces are so aligned against Elon Musk that even though he’s the richest man in the world, they’re not going to allow him to be successful?

BUCK: I think he’s gonna end up taking control of Twitter, but I would add that I’m so psychologically investigated in that outcome that I have to say, I think it’s probably tainting my ability to be entirely objective. And I still think that the most fascinating part of it for me isn’t… Yeah, sure, a free speech platform would be pretty amazing.

I think in the early days of Twitter it was much closer to that. It was also kind of the Wild West. (chuckles) Twitter was crazy in those early days but it was closer to a free speech platform. In recent years it’s become more and more restrictive. But for me seeing the way that while they were lecturing the whole country — the Democrats were lecturing the country — about how a hundred thousand dollars spent on Facebook by Russian bots or whatever by Russian interests was election interference…

You might have one of the most powerful platforms in media companies when it comes to particularly the direction of political conversation in this country lying to the American people and actively putting its thumb on the scale for one side on the other. Not just in a presidential election, a whole range of political affairs.

I think seeing the extent of Twitter censorship and elevation simultaneously, right…? It’s not just pushing some people down. It’s lifting other ideas and individuals up to make them seem more popular, to make them seem more mainstream. The mainstreaming effect that Twitter can have, I think, has been an enormous asset for the left.

“Oh, well, this idea of teach 5-year-olds gender stuff, it’s trending on Twitter! It must have been normal, right?” There’s been a lot that they’ve been able to engage in. I think they’re terrified of that, and I think there are a lot of people even in the legacy media who don’t want it to come out that they’ve had a whole bunch of assistance this whole time.

Another thing, Clay — I tweeted about this over the weekend — same thing’s true at Facebook, folks, with likely even more effect on the national political conversation. And when I say the same thing is true, there’s massive censorship going on at Facebook. They have this whole strikes thing that you get and you have to appeal and they are constantly playing games.

Remember, they always say, “Oh, it’s about hate speech or it’s about the most vile things that a person could say.” That’s a lie. I was getting Twitter and Facebook strikes for saying, “Hey, look at this study on masks. It turns out masks don’t work.” By the way, I’m right and they’re wrong. The little Twitter conversation health morons owe me an apology, but that will never come.

CLAY: It’s a real deal. And we talked to the Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon who pointed this out, but as one who ran a media company, I testified in Congress that we could see, Buck, as soon as we did anything… I don’t have the data in front of me right now. But the first time that we had Donald Trump on the OutKick show, our Facebook traffic immediately declined 80% because we had several stories which were positive in nature with Donald Trump in the headline.

You can go look at the… I don’t know what the Facebook algorithm is, obviously, ’cause they keep that hidden. But you can go look, Buck, at the trajectory of OutKick’s traffic and as soon as we had Trump on, the traffic fell off for two or three weeks before it comes back. We lose 80% of our traffic for having positive stories about Donald Trump at OutKick.

This kind of thing would happen at Facebook when we did mask stories, when I would come out and say, “Hey…” Even quoting from the CDC’s own website, they would ding it as not scientifically accurate. When we did those stories — and people say, “Okay. What’s the impact of that?” Well, the traffic is a huge part of the revenue for the company.

So I could quickly see why so many companies end up toeing the line of what is the line that they’re going to expect and accept at Facebook? We’re never crossing that line because if we do that’s gonna cost us hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of dollars in revenues. And that’s how you end up with groupthink is Facebook — and to a large extent I think Twitter is as well — they decide what’s acceptable opinion and if you cross that line, there’s financial consequences.

BUCK: We’ve also seen this with the massive hypocrisy about election acceptance, I guess you could call it, where after Hillary Clinton lost — that’s right — in 2016 to Donald Trump, social media was an enormous megaphone for all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories about Russia-Trump collusion, about a secret bank or secret processing of transfers from a Russian bank to Trump Tower and about meetings that never actually took place and about a dossier.

Let’s just understand: The pee tape dossier thing was spread all over social media constantly. The whole thing was a lie, okay? The entire thing was just absolute crap. And that was shared all over social media. So I do understand there’s a very real, a seething frustration, because after a 2020 election where there were a lot of things that went on that were I think violations of law but treated as though they weren’t…

Whether it was the extension of the voting deadline in Pennsylvania or the way that there was an abuse of in you safeguards of mail-in balloting, we weren’t even allowed to have a conversation about that in the open after the election. It was, “Shut it down, shut it all down.” So it’s not only that we weren’t able to work out, “Okay.

“What election fraud or what election fraud possibilities, even, for the next time around are real, what are exaggerated? Where do we go? Where do the Democrats maybe cheat? Where did actually things just look that way?” We couldn’t have an open discussion about that, and that came after four years of Democrats pretending Trump stole the election and used Facebook and Twitter and other platforms to constantly share that information.

So the double standard on that issue alone of election integrity and stolen elections — let’s be honest — is breathtaking and infuriating for people who actually wanted to be able to share their ideas and learn about other people’s ideas for what really happened.

CLAY: We let Stacey Abrams become a patron saint in this country, certainly of the Democrat Party.

BUCK: And a millionaire!

CLAY: She went from having a net worth of a hundred thousand dollars to having a net worth of over $3 million. And, Buck, she refused to concede that she lost the election to Brian Kemp. And now she is running again. And I bet if she loses in 2022, she’ll refuse to concede again, and that will further embolden her as one of the faces of the Democratic Party.

So as you look at the hypocrisy that is being played out here, it is so… This is why, for those of you out there — and I understand. It’d be fascinating to know, 5 or 10% of you, maybe, listening right now are on Twitter. But that is where the stories are built. That’s where the narrative comes from. And so having a fair-minded leader of Twitter — someone like Elon Musk who can take this company private and just figure out how to have a publicly available algorithm that would show us once and for all what sort of discrimination is going on.

Because, Buck, I come back to this time and time again because people in tech always say, “Well, that’s not us; it’s the algorithm.” And they never have to answer the question, “Yes, but you built the algorithm.” I could build an algorithm to give me any result that I want, Buck. And so that is why Twitter is such a rigged game. They’ve built these algorithms to consistently favor far-left-wing agenda stories.

They allow them to trend. They make them seem more popular and representative of the American public than they actually are, and then that has a drastic influence in the overall politics. Now, I think the positive is gonna be Democrats have so given themselves over to what Twitter opinion is, that it’s led them astray from where most of the country is, ’cause only about 2% of people are tweeting actively on a day-to-day basis on social media. And all that factors in. And I think it’s gonna end up being one of the death knells of the Democratic Party in 2022.

BUCK: Yeah. The best part about being a Democrat is that you get to be wildly ignorant of reality around you, but have all of your in-group talking about or showing their love for you online for your ideas. The virtue signaling, Clay, that’s the sweet spot right there. This is why you see all these leftists, who all of a sudden are all about putting up that Ukraine flag right next to their photo of themselves on their Twitter profile, double masked — just to be safe — outside.