Elon Musk wants to own Twitter to protect his ‘freedom’, not everyone else’s

theguardian.com:

Elon Musk has now put together a $46.5bn financing package to buy Twitter – two thirds of it from his own assets, and a third from bank loans secured against Twitter’s assets. It’s the biggest acquisition financing ever put forward for one person.

Twitter’s founder and top managers don’t want Musk to take over the company. They offered him a seat on the board but he didn’t want it because he’d have to be responsible to all other shareholders. Now they’re adopting a “poison pill” to stop him. But Musk plans to buy shares directly with a tender offer that shareholders can’t refuse. After all, it’s a free market.

Musk says no one should object to what he wants to do with Twitter because he’s a “free speech absolutist,” and who can be against free speech? Besides, he and his apologists say, if consumers don’t like what he does with Twitter they can go elsewhere. Freedom to choose.

Free market? Free speech? Free choice?

When billionaires like Musk justify their motives by using “freedom,” beware. What they actually seek is freedom from accountability. They want to use their vast fortunes to do whatever they please – unconstrained by laws or regulations, shareholders, or even consumers.

The “free market” increasingly reflects the demands of big money. Unfriendly takeovers, such as Musk is mounting at Twitter, weren’t part of the “free market” until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before then, laws and regulations constrained them. Then came corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Michael Milken. Their MO was to find corporations whose assets were worth more than their stock value, borrow against them, acquire enough shares to force them to cut costs (such as laying off workers, abandoning their communities, busting unions, and