Elon Musk Might Break Twitter. Maybe That's a Good Thing

April 29, 2022

Guests: Felix Salmon

Felix Salmon is Axios's chief financial correspondent and co-host of the Slate Money podcast, where he covers finance, markets, and technology. On the show he analyzes Twitter as an elite attention market rather than a true social network, and dissects the economics of Musk's acquisition bid, meme-stock speculation, and the crypto/Web3 ecosystem.

Listen to the episode

About this episode

Klein talks with Axios chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon about Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter and what the platform actually is. Salmon argues Twitter is less a social network than an elite attention market where journalists, politicians, and investors perform for one another — and that Musk's ownership would bend that market to his own ends. They discuss free speech and content moderation, the economics of attention, Tesla's meme-driven valuation, Dogecoin and crypto speculation, Web3 and DAOs, and why Twitter's political power may be peaking as institutions develop resistance to it. Klein presses whether a privately owned Twitter could be meaningfully more open, and what happens to public discourse when its central nervous system is controlled by the world's richest man.

Read the transcript

Books recommended

0

No book recommendations recorded for this episode.