Elon Musk – the South African billionaire and entrepreneur known for both Tesla and SpaceX – has purchased Twitter from Jack Dorsey. The irony of the situation is that one of the world’s biggest social media platforms is being sold by one of the largest crypto fans to one of the largest crypt fans.
Elon Musk Is Now Twitter’s New Owner
Elon Musk has sworn up and down that his ownership of Twitter will bring about a new level of free speech that many users have not been experiencing or witnessing as of late. Twitter, under Dorsey’s ownership, had a bad habit of cutting out conservatives and either suspending or downright banning anybody with Republican or right-wing leanings (such as Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame).
In testimony before Congress back in 2018 – after the U.S. Senate decided it was going to crack down on social media platforms following the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal – Dorsey claimed that these conservative outings were not occurring at his hand, but rather due to Twitter’s “algorithms.”
He said this was something the company needed to “work on,” though considering President Donald Trump – one of the most well-known conservatives around – was banned permanently from the platform a few years later in 2021 – it can be assumed that neither Dorsey nor any of his counterparts did anything to prevent this behavior from continuing. Congress is also to blame for not putting its foot down a little harder.
Musk is a huge crypto fan, long having spoken well of both Dogecoin and bitcoin. At the time of writing, several pieces of Tesla-based merchandise can be bought with Dogecoin, a popular meme currency, and there was even a brief period back in early 2021 when bitcoin could be used to purchase Tesla vehicles, though this move was later rescinded given that Musk was concerned about the environmental implications of BTC’s mining process.
What Does This Mean for BTC?
Naturally, the big question now that Musk owns Twitter is whether the move will potentially give bitcoin and its digital counterparts a stronger online presence. To be fair, Dorsey – who has long been a bitcoin proponent and was even one of the first major BTC institutional investors through his company Square – has long pushed the BTC agenda and sought to establish bitcoin as a leading digital currency. At the time of writing, Twitter’s many content creators can even be tipped and earn rewards in BTC.
But Musk, while also a cryptocurrency advocate, appears to love digital currency in a different way than Dorsey given that he has long pushed separate coins and his approach to BTC has been more cautionary. For example, while ending his acceptance of the currency for Tesla purchases, Musk has said he will reconsider the situation if miners are willing to be more transparent about their energy sources.