The Digging a Hole Podcast: Kate Klonick on the Twitter Mess

Kate Klonick (right) dropped in on David Schleicher and Digging a Hole, the legal theory podcast, to talk about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.  I highly recommend listening to this episode.  Kate knows people, including people who know people, and she provides incomparable insights into what is going on at Twitter and why, most likely, Twitter will not change all that much, despite Mr. Musk’s mercurial affect and incendiary Tweets.

David and Kate seem to take it as a given that Elon Musk never wanted to buy Twitter, but now he’s stuck with it.  Kate provides the hopeful insight that the one thing that Mr. Musk actually might at some point feel bad about is losing other people’s money.  As a result, he will not run Twitter into the ground, as he mostly bought it with other people’s money.  The thought occurs to me that, if he ends up losing money for his investors, he could just pay them back with some of his surplus billions, but I don’t suppose you get to be a billionaire if that is your attitude.  Anyhoo, Twitter will likely remain much as it is now, which is a relief, since I have become a regular user of the site.  Mr. Musk would like to make it more profitable, but he doesn’t really have any good ideas about how to do so.  Maybe he should have thought more about that before he acquired the company.

Kate notes that Mr. Musk’s skills set does not really match up well when it comes to solving Twitter’s problems.  There is no way to engineer his way into the right decision-making path about content moderation.  The models he is floating for generating revenue, such as turning it into a subscription service or making people pay monthly fees for premium features, are all antithetical to Twitter’s core concept, which is unwalled space in which all meet all.  On Facebook and other social media platforms, you interact with your friends.  Twitter you expose yourself erga omnes.   

David makes the case for having a favorable opinion of Mr. Musk as compared with the other Internet Titans.  Electric cars are a good thing, and rockets are, in David’s view, “cool.” I agree about electric cars, but I thought Tesla existed before Mr. Musk.  I’m not sure what he did to make that company better.  If you want an electric car, you can get a Nissan or a Chevy for $20,000 less than the cheapest Tesla, so I don’t know how you save the planet by selling cars to the one percent.  As for rockets, let’s revisit this issue in thirty years, when I expect that we will all still be living on earth, not Mars, and we may have some regrets about all the space junk circling our planet.  I consider it a colossal failure that our government lost control over rocket technology, and we are now dependent on a private person to launch what seems to be vital infrastructure into space.

Ultimately, Mr. Musk’s goal with SpaceX is manned space flight.   When I was in practice, a fellow associate was a former marine who idolized astronauts.  He had signed copies of their memoirs in his office.  After admiring them, I told him that I thought manned space flight was fine in the 1960s, but now it is just an unconscionable waste of resources.  He did not hesitate  to say, with as much self control as he could muster, “Dude, you’re going to have to leave my office now.”  We remained good friends, and we steered away from the topic in future encounters.  Nonetheless, whenever I encounter somebody with Mr. Musk’s enthusiasm for manned space flight, my inner monologue has not changed: “Grow up,” is what I think and sometimes what I write on a blog or somewhere.

It will be a relief if Twitter survives the Musk takeover.  Yesterday, this Blog reached a new Twitter milestone, and we have come to count on Twitter as a mechanism for drawing eyes to the Blog.

The Digging a Hole website for the Kate Klonick eipsode links to the following recommended readings.  I was pleased to hear that David Schleicher’s opinion of Matt Levine accords with mine exactly: national treasure.  

• “Elon Musk’s Management Style Is a Threat to Global Democracy,” by Kate Klonick 

• “Elon Musk, Plus a Circle of Confidants, Tightens Control Over Twitter,” by Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac, & Kate Conger 

• “Twitter, Once a Threat to Titans, Now Belongs to One,” by Kevin Roose 

• “Elon Musk is Busy With Twitter,” by Matt Levine 

• “Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court,” by Kate Klonick

• “Implications of Revenue Models and Technology for Content Moderation Strategies,” by Yi Liu, Pinar Yildirim, & Z. John Zhang