Will Elon Musk Be the Man Who Saves Twitter?

CLAY: I wanted to update this story that we talked about yesterday. Elon Musk bought 9.2% of the outstanding shares of Twitter. He is now — by a substantial margin — the largest individual shareholder in Twitter stock. This morning early, it was announced that Elon Musk is now going to be on the board at Twitter, and this has provoked a pretty scared response from a lot of the Twitter blue checks who have been arguing, Buck, for years now…

What do they say anytime you criticize anything associated with Twitter, “It’s a private company. If you don’t like it, leave,” and also sometimes they’ll build on it and say, “Just go ahead and build your own company if you don’t like the rules that Twitter is arbitrarily applying.” And, oh, man, Buck, all of a sudden now that Elon Musk is stepping in, and I hope he’s going to be able to lead the charge on Twitter being more of a fair place for discussion, the marketplace of ideas. There are a lot of blue checks who are suddenly troubled by the influence that a billionaire could have on what is allowed to be said in our country.

BUCK: I have to say I really appreciated, and had not heard… Maybe it was the Babylon Bee podcast, because I know that the head of the Babylon Bee was in the video. But on Tucker’s show last night which I was checking out the mono of, they played video, I should say, of Elon Musk explaining wokeness. Did you see this? ‘Cause it was one of the best, one of the best explanations of wokeness I’d ever seen.

Which is people who are vicious and nasty and unkind creating an excuse for themselves and actually an armor of false virtue to go out and be vicious and nasty to other people and bully other people and act like they’re the good guys and gals, so to speak, or whatever. To me, that is what wokeness is, actually. It’s for people who are emotionally and morally compromised and fragile to run around and attack people and think they’re good people for it. It’s like a lashing out. It’s a justification for lashing out. Anyway, Elon said it. It’s brilliant. It’s totally true.

CLAY: It’s almost like this guy is pretty smart. (chuckles)

BUCK: Pretty smart, yeah.

CLAY: You know, my thing, Buck, is I love Elon Musk, right? I’m a capitalist. But for him to think… This is just what I love. I love the pure balls on the idea of, Buck, “Hey, you know what? I think I can send rockets to space better than NASA,” and he did it. To say nothing of anything else that he’s accomplished. And Tesla obviously has changed the dedicate in many ways as it pertains to cars. But to look — and the most brilliant thing I ever heard Elon Musk say, Buck…

I think this is good advice for anybody out there no matter what you’re doing. He said, “There’s lots of people trying to get 10% better, right? If you work at a business, every business, every year. You look at your goals, ‘Hey, let’s get 10% better. Let’s refine our profitability; let’s get 10% better.” So there’s very few people think what can I do in 10 years? Because everybody has short-term horizons. And if you truly want to change the world…

You were talking about this earlier, Buck, how you have to be willing to be a voice in the wilderness in order to challenge the existing dynamic, a paradigm shift as it were. Think about how ballsy you have to be — it’s everything that represents what America should stand for — to think, “I can build better rocket ships than NASA, which has a 60-year head start on me. I’m gonna sending rocket ships and I’m gonna return them and we’re gonna do it more affordably than any country in the world has ever managed to do,” and he did it can SpaceX.

BUCK: And he’s actually made electric cars that are worth driving. (laughing)

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Is another thing.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: The Prius, which was a hybrid, obviously — some of these, you know, earlier efforts, these cars just stunk. So there’s some Prius drivers out there. Send your hate to me on Twitter, and I’ll still make fun of you for it, but it’s okay. I do think it’s the ugliest car design also I’ve ever seen in my life. But nonetheless, I think that Elon Musk… Look, he’s doing here what… Remember toward the end of the year I played audio on this show of Rush reading a Twitter thread that I had written in June of 2020 on the air, on his show, about how a billionaire, conservative billionaire basically need to save the country right now.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: You need to stop writing the occasional check to a boring think tank somewhere. They need to actually step in and see where the conversation’s happening and help us create — the phrase I used was — unsinkable aircraft carriers of freedom of speech.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: Elon is doing that right now, possibly. Possibly. It’s earlier. We gotta see what he actually does and everything else, but he is taking the first steps toward it. This could have huge implications. Even if Twitter dials back the wokeness 30%. Clay, I get dinged all the time for mask stuff still, to this day. I write about masks; they say, “Oh, this is misleading,” and they throttle me down. Five percent of the people that follow me on Twitter end up seeing anything that I now, and this is what they do.

CLAY: I’ve been arguing for a while, Buck, what’s the point having FU money if you aren’t willing to say FU.

BUCK: A lot of people with FU money, Clay, don’t, because they won’t be invited to the country club.

CLAY: We started this show talking about Mitt Romney and how much of a coward he is and how he’s desperately concerned with what other people think about him. Maybe I have the wrong genes. I don’t know, Buck. I really spend almost no time worried about what anybody thinks about me. I care what my wife thinks, I care what my three kids think. They’re in the house with me all day long, every day.

I want to be a good partner, obviously for the show that we do, but I don’t care what random people in my city or my state or my country think about me at all. I’m gonna do what I think is right, and I don’t really care whether there’s people lining up behind me — and what I would give credit to Elon Musk for is, to your point, Buck, I think you’re a hundred percent right.

He’s one of the few billionaires that seems to legitimately stand on principle over being concerned about what people are saying over his shoulder. And even some of the billionaires you’re talking about, they hide, right? They hide their money; they disguise where it’s coming from. Just own what you believe. America’s a fabulous place. Stand up on principle. What are you concerned about? Who cares if people get upset at you?

BUCK: Elon doesn’t even just say the country is at stake over some of these issues — which is true, by the way, when you have the deplatforming of a sitting president from the public digital town square, the closest thing to a digital town square that exists. When you have the suppression during a pandemic of accurate and truthful information like a lot of what we’ve been saying here on the show in defiance of the Fauciite consensus.

Think of all the lives ruined because we aren’t allowed to actually reach the full scope of the internet the way we could have if they hadn’t had the suppression in place for two years, Clay. Elon says it’s not even just America that’s at stake. It’s civilization itself. It’s Western civilization that’s at stake over this, and he’s right. I hope he follows through, man. Could be a game-changer for the national political conversation and culture.

CLAY: I want him to walk in like Ari on Entourage with a paintball gun and just start firing at all the commies inside Twitter headquarters.