It’s been confirmed Elon Musk is buying Twitter, and every major tech figure is having their say – including Twitter co-found Jack Dorsey and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
You might have expected both men to have a predominantly negative on Musk’s Twitter takeover. Dorsey, after all, is the idealistic father of Twitter, while Bezos is a long-time rival to Musk, both in the commercial space business and for the title of world’s richest man.
However, both men have sounded a largely positive note on the current hot topic, albeit with notable qualifications.
In an occasionally tangential series of Twitter posts that (Radiohead’s ‘Everything in its Right Place’ is linked to at one point), the most salient point to take from Dorsey’s response appears to be this one:
In short: Dorsey doesn’t believe that any one person should own Twitter. Under ‘real world’ conditions, however, he’s glad that Elon Musk is the one person taking ownership of his baby.
As for Musk’s space-racing rival Jeff Bezos, he started his take with a question that highlighted a potential future conflict with China:
Bezos was retweeting a take posited by journalist Mike Forsythe, who pointed out that Tesla’s heavy interest in China (the electric car company’s second-biggest market) might give the Chinese government fresh leverage over a Musk-owned Twitter, which has been banned in the country since 2009.
Lest you think this was a wholehearted pop at Musk, however, Bezos followed up by saying: “My own answer to this question is probably not. The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter”, and that “Musk is extremely good at navigating this kind of complexity.”
So there you have it. Two of the most prominent figures in the tech world, both giving cautious approval to Musk’s Tesla takeover. Are you convinced?
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.