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Elon Musk is the world's richest person, according to those who keep track of such things.
He can buy whatever he wants, which he has. He has sponsored private flights to space. He is most known for the electric car, with his Teslas making him a patron saint of environmentalists.
If you could buy whatever you want, you would have the same choice as Musk. You could buy objects because you desire them. Or you could buy things because you want to fix them.
In recent weeks Musk has decided he wants to fix free speech. A libertarian, Musk concedes that free speech is meant to accommodate extreme views on all sides - an imperfections-and-all thought marketplace that was always intended by the First Amendment. He committed to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, make it a private company and make changes to improve its free speech capability. His offer produced a windfall for Twitter shareholders and is well above what other companies that have looked at buying Twitter were willing to offer.
But the board of Twitter publicly resisted Musk's original offer and devised a plan to sell shares to existing stockholders at reduced prices to give them enough stake in the company to make Musk's purchase offer less valuable. Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders be damned, they were willing to turn down Musk's original $43 billion offer.
Suddenly, Musk the Tesla guru became a threat to free speech in the eyes of Twitter powerbrokers, many of its employees and much of the corporate media.
None of that made financial sense.
So, while it's great Twitter eventually accepted Musk's purchase offer, why did the board initially declare war on an obviously good deal for shareholders and why did corporate media sirens flood airwaves and print pages with warnings that a Musk-operated Twitter would mark the end of free speech?
The answer is that a Musk takeover - if he holds true to everything he has promised – will end their version of free speech.
Their version allows them to silence any conservative-oriented speech under the guise of "community standards," whatever they are, while any number of rogue dictators flood the Twitterverse with anti-American lies.
According to a Media Research Center investigation, Big Tech censored or deleted content unfavorable to President Biden 646 times between March 2020 and March 2022. Some of it was as simple as videos showing Biden acting or speaking in an embarrassing way. President Trump embarrassed himself plenty. I don't recall Twitter deleting any retweets of that.
Their version of free speech allows them to label anything they don't agree with "misinformation" and take the content down.
Their version of free speech allows censorship of the New York Post's reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election, reporting proven completely credible in the months since.
According to a Media Research Center poll, 45 percent of President Biden's voters were not fully aware of the story. If the story had been allowed on Twitter and allowed to breathe in the corporate media, 9.4 percent of those who voted for Joe Biden said they would not have done so. Even if you deduct points because you consider the polling biased, the percentage of those whose vote would have changed would have impacted the presidential election outcome.
Consider events that have happened as a result - runaway inflation that effects every American and especially the lower economic classes, unprecedented supply chain woes, energy policies enacted on Day 1 of the Biden administration that have triggered a $1.50-a-gallon increase in gasoline prices, a premature departure from Afghanistan that left behind American military, their Afghani aides and $80 billion in advanced military equipment for terrorists, policy changes that have left our southern border open to illegal immigrants, human trafficking and lethal drugs, and an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, whose dictator obviously sees weakness in the president and administration.
The Twitter board would not have initially resisted billions of dollars without underlying reasons.
The biggest one probably was the thought of Musk getting access to the algorithms that create censorship trends on Twitter's version of free speech. To a certain extent, this is not surprising. This is Twitter's playground and their powerbrokers and many employees didn't want someone viewed as a threat taking it over.
Hopefully, Musk did not have to sell out any of his plans to get Twitter's approval of the sale.
But their initial actions reveal all you need to know about what these people think of free speech, regardless of what happens going forward.
Free speech means you being able to say or write something that I don't agree with and me not being able to do anything other than allow it and challenge it civilly using my free speech rights.
As someone who has wanted to do journalism since the seventh grade, the inexcusable aspect of the Musk opposition was the gnashing of teeth among people who call themselves journalists.
It's a profession that does not promise riches or fame. It is a profession that allows us to exercise the First Amendment of the Constitution to the extreme with the goal of informing people objectively and seeking truth and accountability from those who lead this democracy.
To hear those who are supposed to represent the embodiment of free speech attempt to take down an effort to reinforce it is disheartening and scary.
And it should lead all Americans, regardless of their politics, to examine closely who they can trust when they are consuming information.
David Troisi is the Sun-Gazette's retired editor. None of the opinions expressed necessarily represent those of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette.