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Comment by JaimeThompson | Hacker News Reader

Seems it would be better for Musk's stated goals to use this money to expand clean energy, SpaceX, and such things instead of buying a social media application.

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Why do you think Besos bought the Washington Post for what, $200 million... right after AWS got that $600 million CIA web services contract? Notably there are no more "Top Secret America" investigations looking into how the US government feeds money to defense contractors at the WaPo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America

Is Musk following in Besos steps, or will he really open source the ranking algoritm and increase the character count of posts to paragraph-scale (512-1024 characters)? Time will tell I suppose.

This is also something strange, Musk talks about opening the algorithm but hasn't, as far as I can tell, talked about opening the datasets, models, etc that the algorithm depends on which makes it a bit less useful then it could be. He knows this from his work with Tesla so the lack of clarity is strange to me.

> Why do you think Besos bought the Washington Post

Because it was cheap and he wants to support journalism. Seems a lot more likely than your conspiracy theory.

If you can point to a single investigative journalism story / series similar in scope and detail to Top Secret America published in the WaPo since Besos acquired it, then I will recant my opinion.

> Because it was cheap and he wants to support journalism.

Sure, WaPa does fantastic journalism- it's obvious that they must be supported for their lengthy history of great pieces.

Twitter is like a cancer, it really gets to some people and overtakes them. I wish Musk would just logout and focus on Starship.

Maybe he's run out of ideas to build there.

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