Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter. So far he's willing to pay $50 plus doobies for each share he needs to turn the public company private. Technically, his offer is $54.20 per share, with the $4.20 of specificity widely interpreted as reflecting the marijuana slang he likes to deploy. He says it's his "best and final" offer, but the Twitter board of directors is less than thrilled, and Musk has hinted that he'll go directly to shareholders. Hostile takeover attempts are always good for that kind of intrigue, but this one has interest beyond business.
Why is Musk high on gaining accountability for a company with a blue bird logo and black-eye reputation, a history of net losses, and billions of socially precarious tweets?
• "Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it." (Musk, in a letter to Twitter's chairman, with echoes of "I alone can fix it.")
• "He's bored." (Teenage son of New York Times pundit and podcaster Kara Swisher. But "never boring," adds Swisher, in a column titled "Elon Musk Knows Exactly What He's Doing.")
• "If in doubt, let the speech … exist." (Musk again, at a TED conference last week. He believes that "Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square" — though just a small slice of the population actively posts there — and that it has failed to inclusively accommodate the world's assortment of cogent, clever and crazy.)
We'd guess that each bullet point applies, though he seems most invested in the third.