Twitter and Silicon Valley's dirty little secret

It is no secret that mainstream media, academia and celebrities lean far Left. They get together in one voice and support Leftist causes, Leftist ideologies and Leftist parties. In the US they support the Democrats, in the UK Labour and in India the Congress. That’s why they hate American Republicans, British Tories and our desi BJP. For them there is only one form of free speech: Leftist speech. All other forms of speech constitute hate speech. This applies to liberals, intellectuals, Hollywood and the like.

That’s the way it’s been for decades. People are used to it and don’t even bat an eyelid. That is the norm. One would have thought that Silicon Valley would be totally different. It was built on the foundations of capitalism, science, technology, entrepreneurship and free spirit.

Though it took off in the 1970s, it was the Reaganomics of the 1980s that gave them a real fillip. One would have thought that the then US President Ronald Reagan would be their mascot. But they have ended up being more Leftist and Marxist than all of the above  and Reagan is a villain.

You will struggle to find any Republican billionaire in Silicon Valley. Probably the only clear exception is the PayPal mafia don Peter Thiel of Palantir, Clarum Capital and Founders Fund. Most of the employees of tech companies lean Left and are Democrats.

Silicon Valley is a Leftist Mecca and one struggles to find any counter view. Oracle’s Larry Ellison does contribute to Republican causes, but the lion’s share goes to Democrats. They also don’t like Leftist-Democrat Mark Zuckerburg for the simple reason that Thiel was one of the early investors in Facebook.

It is in this context that you will understand the absolute meltdown that is happening world over regarding the takeover Twitter by Elon Musk. The interesting part is that Musk himself has been a long-time Democrat supporter, but the fact that he is sympathetic towards Republicans is anathema. You need to be a cent per cent Leftist. You are either with them or against them. There is no middle ground.

That is why Musk is hated because he is seeking the middle ground, absolutely abhorred by the Leftists. But that had led to a lot of legacy problems with Twitter. In the past Twitter itself favoured Leftists and not been inclusive. That led to myriad problems with free speech, which only the Leftists seem to have on the platform.

Thanks to this while Twitter arguably remains the most powerful social media platform in the world, it is a financial disaster. While six tech companies have touched a valuation of $1 trillion (Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta & Tesla), Twitter went for less than half of $100 billion.

Out of all the companies that achieved great global fame in the 2010s, Twitter is one of the biggest underachievers. There are close to 15 platforms with 500+ million users. Twitter is not one of them. To make matters worse, a good chunk of its nearly 400 million users may be bots.

That’s where Musk stands a great chance of making Twitter more inclusive, more conducive to free speech, drastically increase the user base and make great profits on top of it all. The potential is great and if anyone can do it, it is a genius like Musk.