Get in, loser, we’re buying Twitter. A flash of lightning, a crack of thunder, and our nation of the too-online looked up in horror and excitement — Elon Musk had once again done something.

Monday, a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed the billionaire Shitposting God of Silicon Valley, who just weeks ago teased news concerning censorship on social media, straight-up bought 9.2 percent of Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder. This alone was enough to trigger the internet’s most tedious, speech-policing hall monitors to breathless fits of hysteria. Little did they know, their nightmare had just begun. Wednesday, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced Elon would join the company’s board, and Team Yay Censorship lost its mind. Their stated points of concern were — and remain — as numerous as they are incoherent, as the hive-mind hasn’t yet settled on a common argument, and almost none of Elon’s critics actually believe what they’re saying. The real reason members of the censorship class are angry is they are currently empowered by the most dominant speech platforms in history to amplify their own, narrow voices, and to silence their political enemies. This tremendous, wildly dangerous privilege is now perceived as threatened by the introduction of Musk to Twitter’s board. The question is free speech. Elon’s detractors believe “unfettered conversations” are dangerous. Elon believes free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. The censorship people thought they had the game on lock, but power has a way of shifting, which is why the wise among us tend to want it balanced. The hall monitors are furious.

We love this.

At the time of Steve Jobs’ death there was the popular question of who would assume his de-facto position as industry leader. Today, it’s hard to even imagine a world in which the role does not belong to Elon. For direction, inspiration, and vision concerning the very best of what technologists have to offer, men and women of the industry point to the man who lands rockets. Unjustifiably, we share his victories, and he stands for our failures. The pressure is unfair, and the kind of teenaged boyishness with which Musk approaches social media has always struck me as a bit of rebelliousness in response. Meme by meme, the man attempts to remind us he’s not our savior, and he’s not our Satan. He’s just the richest man alive who happens to have founded like ten different companies fundamentally altering our world, whatever, no big deal. Alas, the draw to kings and burning them is primal shit you can’t escape, and Musk was chosen.

In this age of social media, it was inevitable a figure of such influence would come to evoke love and hate in intimate, daily measure the deafening magnitude of which Jobs could not have imagined. But of particular interest is the strangeness with which even Elon’s fiercest critics, in derision, cannot help but imbue their most hated villain with supernatural, almost god-like powers. They truly do believe he’s capable of anything, which is why they’re so upset. They think this guy might actually save free speech, and for authoritarians that is an existential threat.

Their hysteria was profound. We had reporters-turned-think tank people arguing Elon planned to use the platform to destroy his critics. Presumably, this destruction would come in the form of tweets. For those not entirely plugged in, we’re presently in the middle of a great debate over the topic of whether responding to journalists who write about you for the largest media platforms in the world constitutes literal violence. Such response has struck the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz with PTSD, for example. There was more:

Elon is going to rebuild a soviet-era instrument of propaganda! The rich and powerful controlling speech is good, no the rich and powerful controlling speech is bad! Elon is going to dismantle Twitter, actually! And we’re still really mad about Gawker!

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick argued “empathy” and “decency” were key to managing Twitter. Since Elon has neither quality, Masnick argued, he will fail at managing Twitter. Evidence for Elon’s dearth of character was not presented, nor was what would have been a helpful line or two on how exactly Musk will be managing Twitter.

But the star of our story was Glitch CEO Anil Dash, a pro-censorship guy, and a kind of influencer in the space of disingenuous social justice grievances spun up for clout on social media. Full disclosure, this is a man who once accused me of throwing a Nazi conference after I penned an essay about Hereticon with my explicit intention to platform, among many ~ wild and crazy ~ people, UFO enthusiasts, sex workers, and drag queens. He is a man of relentless fantasy. The press loves him.

First, Anil argued, Elon wasn’t qualified to build “healthy communities,” which Anil apparently defines as strictly politically leftist, and authoritarian enough to enforce the politics. Then, there would be a chilling effect on journalism because Elon would “target” reporters on the platform, his word here used in place of “criticize reporting,” which Elon already does, for which Twitter wouldn’t ban him, which it already doesn’t. Finally, and inevitably, there was the erroneous, unhinged implication, with no credible evidence, that Elon is racist. To this point, there’s not much of an argument I can make that will persuade you either way. You’re either the kind of person who believes “racist” is a serious accusation deserving of real evidence, or you believe it’s just a weapon you can use against your enemies whenever you don’t want to share your actual concern, in this case freedom.

MSNBC’s Sam Stein came in with something very close to the truth:

People have stupidly compared politicians to Hitler for the last eight decades. We just endured five years of such comparisons to Donald Trump, in fact, many of which have come from Sam’s colleagues. But the problem here, clearly, is not the comparison to Hitler, but to whom Elon made the comparison: Justin Trudeau, a political leftist, and therefore Not a Nazi, How Dare You. Criticism of Trudeau implies Musk is either a political leftist with honor enough to publicly dissent when the earnest feeling strikes him, or he is not a political leftist. For his critics, neither of these realities are tenable. In order to enforce narrative obedience across our social media platforms, political monoculture among social media leadership must be maintained. Clearly, Musk does not adhere to the political monoculture in vogue. Therefore, any fantasy version of Twitter with a greatly-empowered Musk is a freer platform. This is the only concern. The New York Times, as Ben Thompson sharply noted this morning, agrees. From their latest:

The plan jibes with Mr. Musk’s, Mr. Dorsey’s and Mr. Agrawal’s beliefs in unfettered free speech. Mr. Musk has criticized Twitter for moderating its platform too restrictively and has said more speech should be allowed. Mr. Dorsey, too, grappled with the decision to boot former President Donald J. Trump off the service last year, saying he did not “celebrate or feel pride” in the move. Mr. Agrawal has said that public conversation provides an inherent good for society.

Their positions have increasingly become outliers in a global debate over free speech online, as more people have questioned whether too much free speech has enabled the spread of misinformation and divisive content.

An insane admission from the Times, but I’m glad we’re finally having an honest conversation. Who is entitled to speak their mind? Who is “deserving” of a platform? Most importantly of all, who is worthy of the power to censor? To this question, Jack unambiguously delivered his answer before Congress: nobody.

In calls for such things as “empathy” and “healthy communities,” censors purposely drag us to the realm of ambiguity, because when there are no clear rules governing decisions to censor true information, or to deplatform critics of misinformation, all that matters is whoever is in power. This information landscape brings us naturally — by design — to such grand slam greatest hits as Hunter Biden’s laptop fiasco, in which a story was suppressed by our social media platforms to assist a political candidate favored by employees of our social media platforms.

Just this week, over in the world of “harm reduction,” New York Magazine reported Black Lives Matters leadership had friends at Facebook suppress an embarrassing story about what appears to be the organization’s ongoing corruption. This is an especially important example, as it highlights the clear fact that our present system of censorship is not in place to defend journalists. Our present system of censorship is in place to enforce a very specific, clearly political worldview, to defend adherents of this worldview, and to erase detractors.

For years, Jack was personally blamed for censorship on Twitter. Hell, I blamed him myself. But as I followed his public positions more closely my opinion changed, and my read when he stepped down as Twitter’s CEO was actually the man never had enough power to achieve his goal for the company, which was the permanent removal of censorship powers from centralized authority. This desire is the basis for what appears to be his ongoing bromance with Musk, who also wants to limit centralized powers of censorship. Just yesterday, Jack mentioned he wanted Elon on his board. The two share values, and one in particular: freedom. Agrawal appears to share this value as well, as evidenced by his work on Bluesky, Twitter’s much-discussed decentralized social media protocol, as well as Jack’s enthusiasm for his leadership. If executed properly, Bluesky would answer many of Jack and Elon's concerns about our increasingly unfree internet. But until this week, there was no indication such lofty goals were even worth discussing. They didn’t seem possible.

If Jack didn’t have enough power, what was Agrawal supposed to do with even less? But Elon stepping up, while not a slam dunk victory for speech, does change the landscape. We now have at least three men on Twitter’s board, two of whom own over ten percent of the company, at ideological odds with political censorship. Then, to the rest, there’s nobody relevant in tech who doesn’t want Musk to like them — that counts for something. Nothing is so certain as Elon’s greatest fans, who are of course his greatest critics, would have you believe. He’s not actually a god. But there’s a little more hope for speech this week than last.

Short of Jack himself returning with the Elon board assist, freshly-polished wizard beard on gnarly display, uranium-bedazzled nose ring glinting in the curls of chaos magic emanating off of his celestial, final form, this is frankly the best news we could hope for. And listen, at the end of the day, all of the worst people on Twitter are miserable.

Humbled and blessed.

-SOLANA