Elon Can Do What He Wants, But

Let's parse out an article at Red State this morning: What Is a Woman? Elon Shows Pendulum May Be Swinging Back to Reality With Hilarious Babylon Bee Video. Let's just start with some context -- what does the great man himself think of women? As best we can determine, at least some of his numerous offspring were conceived in vitro and sublet out to surrogates, which suggests to me that he himself is a hard Hefnerian who sees women as commodities whose bodily functions can be bought and sold. But at Red State, he's swinging us back to reality. Mister, we could use a man like Hugh Hefner again.

Let's look farther down in rhe piece. It discusses the retweet from Musk of a Babylon Bee video below and how it represents Musk's motivation to buy Twitter:

Spelling Bee Contestant Asks The Definition of “Woman” pic.twitter.com/gOgDj9Oxsg

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 28, 2022

The article says,

The video was from June, but they were suspended from Twitter in March over calling Rachel Levine a man, so they posted the video again on Wednesday. But under Twitter 1.0, you weren’t [sic] have been allowed to see that kind of humor or that speech skewering the present problem with the left. Now you can again, and that’s positive movement. Indeed, it was the Babylon Bee suspension that got Musk interested in buying Twitter, to begin with, because of his belief in free speech.

Let's look at a hypothetical. Let's say Warren Buffett goes to the movies and sees a film that he finds offensive. In fact, he thinks it's so offensive and culturally destructive that it's the figurative straw that breaks the camel's back. Someone says to him after the show, "Mr Buffett, look at the wonderful thing Elon Musk has done in buying Twitter. Why don't you do the same thing for our country and buy a Hollywood studio that will now make the right kind of films?"

Now, I'm no Warren Buffett scholar. But listening to his homespun explanations of investing, I think he'd simply reply, "But I don't know anything about Hollywood. I'd probably lose everything I put into buying a studio," and that would be the end of it.

We might try to parse this out a little farther. Buffett isn't actually investing his own money. He's investing the money of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, as well as the profits from businesses he understands, like insurance. The shareholders trust his business judgment, and if he were suddenly to buy a Hollywood studio, they'd wonder why he'd do this, notwithstanding his idealistic motives, and unless his strategy showed sudden success, they'd likely begin to disinvest from Berkshire Hathaway.

Not only that, but if Buffet bought a studio, laid off half its employees, and simply dithered in public about just what kind of movies he was going to make, displaying in the process how little he actually understood about principles like natural law or classical virtues, he'd wind up doing actual harm to the causes he ostensibly supported.

This is what makes the right's tendency to think the best of Musk so puzzling. There seems to be an instinctive trust that Musk's heart is in the right place, so what could go wrong? But we have the problem of figs from thistles, his business judgment isn't all that good to start with. There was public information in the form of the whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko's allegations that Twitter's internal controls were so poor that repeated data center calamities threatened its continued existence, yet Musk seens to have understood so little about corporate controls and data security that he didn't follow up and instead on impulse made an overgenerous offer for a company that had little actual value.

Musk may now see himself as some sort of John the Baptist making straight the way, or maybe he thinks he's swinging some sort of pendulum, but the problem for him is that the job of prophet doesn't pay very well, and his lifestyle is expensive. And the people who invested in companies like Tesla were expecting to see well-run businesses, but the whole Twitter drama is suggesting that's not what they've got. Soon enough, Musk is going to have to decide whether he's cut out to be a Warren Buffett or a John the Baptist, but I have a feeling he's neither.