When Elon Musk buys into Twitter, I don’t need a little bird to tell me something’s afoot

theguardian.com:

When the news broke last week that Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s richest man, had paid $2.9bn (£2.3bn) for 9.2% of Twitter, the media world – old and new – briefly lost what might loosely be called its collective mind. What was Musk up to? (He’s always up to something, after all, even if it’s just trolling. And, with more than 80 million Twitter followers, he’s quite an effective troll.)

Since nobody knows what goes on inside Musk’s head, fevered speculation began. One camp thought that he had just done it “for the lulz” (fun, amusement, humour, schadenfreude). Indeed, if your net worth is $290bn, $2.9bn is effectively loose change. And it made him the biggest single shareholder in the company. Twitter then recognised the gravity of the situation and agreed to give him a seat on the board in a deal that supposedly prevents him from buying a majority stake in the business.

For what it’s worth, I don’t buy the lulz explanation. Of course Musk loves playing to his vast gallery, but something far more serious is afoot. He wants to make significant changes to the way Twitter works. In particular, he believes the platform ought to have an edit button that would enable people to revise their tweets post-transmission. He polled his Twitter followers asking if they agreed. Of the 4.4 million who voted, 73.6% said yes.

Why is this interesting? Basically because Musk has a problem with his own addiction to Twitter. It’s called the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the powerful agency of the federal government that was created in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and whose primary purpose is to enforce the law against market manipulation. And Musk has been in conflict with the