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Elon Musk Buys Twitter and Twitter Users Obviously Have Some Thoughts

A photo of Elon Musk looking pensive with a tweet overlaid reading "Men will literally spend billions on a social media platform instead of going to therapy."

It’s official: The world’s wealthiest person decided to use his vast fortune (and a lot of additional funds he had to come up with because money is fake and most of his is actually stocks and stuff) to buy Twitter.

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Twitter’s board accepted Elon Musk’s offer/demand to buy the site for $44 billion Monday afternoon. No one knows exactly how this will change the site in either the short or long term, but you can tell a lot by who is celebrating this purchase. As a hint, there are a lot of Pepe the Frog avatars having their best day ever.

While Musk has said his goal was to “liberate” the site from censorship, that’s a pretty meaningless claim on its own. He wrote Monday, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” which is not what “free speech” really means but fine. Also pretty much no one believes that Musk will have no terms of service regarding content posting, in part because that would be a legal nightmare but also because Musk has shown us who he is, and it’s not a guy who can handle criticism of any kind.

A lot of people are talking about leaving the site (an understandable reaction!) while others are wondering how much worse the platform can actually get.

Mostly, people are just marveling at the outlandishly selfish, straight-up unethical decision to spend this much money on Twitter.

(image: Joshua Lott/Getty Images, Twitter)

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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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