Thinking About Elon Musk
One of the year's biggest stories was the eccentric billionaire's takeover of Twitter. How should Christians think about this?
My latest piece for World reflects on one of the biggest newsmakers of the year, Elon Musk. How should Christians think about this eccentric billionaire?
It has been a month and a half since Elon Musk took over Twitter, and it would be an understatement to say that the eclectic billionaire’s leadership has produced a seismic reaction. He has made several important changes to the social media app, fired quite a few staff, and seen major defections from top management. Musk has also partnered with several journalists to reveal what was suspected by most conservatives: Twitter has been governed by a censorious left-wing team whose idea of content moderation seemed only to punish what they see as right-wing wrongthink.
Liberals have recoiled at Musk, ramping up their perennial pearl-clutching about the end of democracy, while conservatives have cheered his iconoclasm, finding in Musk a new ally in the battle against entrenched opposition in the leadership class of many of our institutions. Journalists have feverishly covered every single new development inside the tech giant, with an importance and depth that parallels war coverage.
So how should Christians think about the world’s richest (or second-richest) man? On one hand, we can be grateful for Musk blowing a breath of fresh air through the echo chamber of Twitter, bringing more transparency and balance to this powerful platform that influences so much of the news media narrative. On the other hand, we might caution ourselves against lionizing the billionaire as if he’s leading some new kind of Reformation. He’s not the Apostle Paul forging a new Roman Road of communication.
You can read the whole piece here.