I was in Moscow in August 1991 with my wife and three children, and after a two-hour wait, we finally were able to get into McDonalds, which had just opened four months before, the first one in Russia. While we were enjoying our Big Macs, my oldest son, David, looked out the window and remarked that tanks were going down the street. I told him that this was the USSR and that tanks on the streets were not exactly unusual. He said, “But, Dad, there are civilians on these tanks!” I jumped up because I knew this was more than unusual; it was history. A coup had just begun; four months later, the USSR collapsed.
Very few events change history, and they often do not seem so important at the time they happen. One of these happened in 2022, when Elon Musk bought out Twitter for $44 billion and changed the name to X in March 2023. He paid twice what the company was worth, and many thought buying it was folly.
But Musk did not become the richest man in the United States by being a fool. Elon Musk marches to his own drummer, and thus, he identifies with another contrarian, Donald Trump. Musk was deeply bothered by Twitter’s lack of free speech, particularly toward Trump.
Trump was one of the platform’s most high-profile and influential users, with some 88 million followers. His tweets often received significant engagement, evidenced by millions of likes, retweets, and replies. His posts were also highlighted in many other media sources.
But in January 2021, he was no longer president, and immediately, Donald Trump was permanently banned from Twitter for disturbing tweets. The ban would last for the next two and a half years. All this changed after Musk purchased Twitter and renamed it X. No one seemed to like the new name, but it did not bother Musk. He had a long-standing fascination with the letter “X,” evidenced by his SpaceX, Tesla Model X, etc.
Elon Musk was disgusted that Hunter Biden’s laptop story was considered Russian interference and backed by 51 former high government officials, and any pushback was restricted or banned. The same censoring took place with dissenting narratives toward COVID, DEI, the effects of transition treatments on youth, etc. There were also continual reports of how President Biden was “sharp as a tack.” All of these turned out to be exactly the opposite of what they claimed.
It was precisely for this reason that our Founding Fathers prohibited the abridging of freedom of speech in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Somewhere along the line, this got forgotten because blocking “abiding the freedom of speech” was exactly what had been going on. Putting a stop to this returned Donald Trump to his ability to get his message out freely without “fact checkers” who were consistently wrong.
And recently, it saved the American people billions of wasted money from the Continuing Resolution in Washington, D.C. It has been a pattern for Congress to avoid accountability for overspending by waiting until almost the end of the year, then present a grift-heavy bill and demanding that it be immediately passed before the year-end recess under threat of a government shutdown.
The first bill was over 1,500 pages long, another legislative trick because no one could digest it in time. But Musk created an artificial intelligence program, Grok, that could and did, and the analysis was posted on X so everyone could see a summary of what was in the bill. Not surprisingly, folks were not too happy when voters saw that Congress would fund a 35% raise for themselves, give more funding for government censorship, give immunity from prosecution for the corrupt J6 committee, etc. They were swamped with complaints. It failed the first time and the second, and finally, the third bill was pared down to one-tenth of the original and was finally passed, and President Biden signed it.
The venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya recognized X’s impact: “People are underestimating what happened here. This was a multi-hundred billion dollar grift that was stopped on a dime over 12 hours of tweets. You would have never thought this was possible. To put a dagger in something that big that had so much broad support just a few hours earlier is so consequential in how the United States can run going forward.” (Way to go, Elon Musk! You just made history — and maybe changed it.)
