It's still too early to determine how much, if any, of Washington's worst fears about Elon Musk's Twitter takeover might come true. But the cheering of Musk's markedly different approach to social media governance by a loose constellation of his superfans, sympathetic tech-world billionaires and disgruntled conservatives is a novel enough development in its own right. They are not freaked out. They are convinced that Musk is going to succeed, turning a platform that was modestly profitable at best into a money-printing machine that flips the bird, almost literally, to their ideological opponents. "Love him or hate him - but Twitter is a million times better and more fun since @elonmusk took over," wrote the conservative troll account pseudonymously named — yes, unfortunately — "catturd2." The tech-world favorite podcaster Lex Fridman proclaimed that "Twitter is better than Netflix right now." The VC and writer Mike Solana noted the national press' lack of understanding when it comes to Silicon Valley, saying "there are engineers in SF trying to work at twitter right now entirely because they think it might be hard," something political writers "genuinely can not fathom." In short: Liberals and even many establishment conservatives simply don't get the philosophy that Musk is bringing to Twitter, and their dismay at his changes to it is proof enough in itself. That makes Musk's ownership of Twitter more than just a billionaire's vanity project or a tech-world skirmish over moderation. It's a window into a distinct mindset, common to Silicon Valley but not exclusively of it, that glorifies individual dynamism over group consensus-building; frontier-like, suck-it-up-buttercup speech norms over crowd-pleasing moderation; and out-of-fashion ideas about the " wisdom of crowds " over the prescriptions of "experts." The result is a new-school twist on tech libertarianism that merges that world's cult of the "founder" with modern conservative critiques of liberal institutions. It's not dissimilar from the business-friendly-with-an-asterisk, culture-warring form of conservatism practiced by Gov. Ron DeSantis in his " Free state of Florida ," but its fans aren't limited just to red states — just check your Twitter feed. Antonio García Martínez, an author and tech entrepreneur, summed up this mindset and its grievances well in a Twitter thread that declared Musk's takeover a "revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies)." In other words: A revolt by billionaires against ... their own employees. This positions, in Martínez's grievance-bearing parlance, the "HR regime, the ESG grifters , the Skittles-hair people with mouse-clicking jobs who think themselves bold social crusaders rather than a parasitic weight around any organization's neck," against another Twitter gadfly 's hypothetical "100 passionate libertarian engineers" with equity in the company, capable of turning it around overnight by the sweat of their brow and sheer self-interest — and who, implicitly, believe they're capable of graduating from "employee" to Musk-like moguldom overnight through hard work and a lucky break. Those engineers, along with right-leaning figures in the tech world like Musk and his close friend David Sacks, a venture capitalist and adviser on the Twitter project, share a classically libertarian passion for free speech and free markets. Where that tried-and-true, bottom-right-of-the-political-compass mindset finds its modern twist is in the particular conflict that Martínez describes: Prime movers like Musk now struggle not just against the greedy, parasitic welfare bureaucrats of Ayn Rand's imagination, but a cultural regime that seeks to cement its dominance through corporate governance (not to mention academia and the media). A dynamic "builder," after all, is nothing without a foil to struggle against — and all things considered, post-Reagan America is still pretty damn friendly to capital. The story of Silicon Valley since the 1980s is one of unfettered freedom and " permissionless innovation ," with a few notable exceptions . That level of comfort could be what leads a self-described "free speech absolutist" like Musk to muse about his support for DeSantis, a man who used the power of the state to punish one of its major employers for … speaking out against legislation it didn't like. The libertarians and culture warriors now have the same target: " woke capital ." Read the rest of the story here at POLITICO Magazine.
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