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Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

Missing option (3). Jack Ma, prominent billionaire, was surrounded by kiss-asses for the past 5-10 years. In doing so, he developed a distorted sense of his own intelligence/power/allies which caused him to make a calculation about the current state of Chinese politics and power that is obviously false to an outside observer.

See also, Twitter is was not worth $44 billion in 2022.

Missing option (4). If you have billions, sacrificing a lot of wealth and power to do something you want is just another valid option.

See also, sacrificing 20% of your net worth to support "freedom of speech" is a reasonable choice, especially if you are left with an objective fortune.

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Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech. For a while he banned any mention of Mastodon, or the ElonJet account, and he's banned a whole slew of antifascist accounts and journalists who report on the far right (he will claim that it's because they violated rules, but in each case it seems it was a new rule: journalism he doesn't like is "doxxing": reporting on who did what). So sure, it looks like he is willing to lose a big chunk of his net worth to change Twitter, but his intent seems to be to promote certain speech and suppress other speech, or as he would say, to kill the "woke mind virus".

It’s worth noting that Elon unbanned a whole slew of accounts that had been silenced simply for disagreeing with what happen to be your political priorities. Who has Elon banned for their politics? Being banned for tweeting Andy Ngo’s current home address is very different from being banned for saying that COVID-19 likely originated in a laboratory.

He suspended ADSBExchange and Elonjet. Accounts sharing open source and public data that he didn’t like. He went so far as to specifically ban the use of the link to his jet on Twitter.

FWIW I know it’s his right to do this as he owns the platform but it is relevant in the context of “but Elon didn’t do X”

If this were the reason Ngo managed to get a lot of his critics banned you might have a point. But: https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...

It doesn't matter for what we're talking about if Elon's "freedom of speech" is an ironic take on people only being able to listen to him or actual freedom or whatever. The point is, blowing 44 billion USD on a hobby/for a point he cares about is a reasonable cost for him (and Bezos. Maybe a few others)

> Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech.

It seems to be supporting Musk's freedom of speech just fine.

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