Why doesn’t Elon Musk help the poor instead of saving free expression?
Moment 173
You have surely seen the many folks asking why Elon Musk is so selfish and stupid to buy Twitter for “free expression” rather than actually doing something useful to humankind, like cure poverty.
Setting aside small issues like what $43 billion can actually do on the poverty side, these comments illustrate how poorly many people grasp the importance of free expression.
In my series I have talked about many dozens of angles and complexities to free expression, but I haven’t talked enough about how much it brings us, and how much it disproportionately helps the poor.
Using the "Why not cure hunger" or "Help the homeless" are misdirection. It's hard (although many still try ) to argue that more free speech is a bad idea when "Cure Hunger" or "Cure homelessness" are at surface level reasonable sounding acts that look to do more than the free speech action. Most people don't understand the complexities of things like homelessness because they believe all homeless people are homeless because they have no way to acquire housing. They don't realize a good many who are homeless are there either by choice or due to issues with drugs or mental health. For hunger they don't understand the complexities of international commerce, how difficult it is to bring food to people in some countries due to that nations government, usually a dictatorial like state. You bring in food only for actors of that state to steal it and redistribute it to those who support the government.
Owning Twitter will make him money too. Getting more money is part of the plan isn’t it?