Commentary
Like WeChat in China, Musk seeks to merge Twitter’s social media app, banking, payments, and many more activities into a single source of information—and monitoring.
Twitter, as we know it, anyway, has ceased to exist.
According to a filing in California federal court on April 4, Twitter Inc. is no longer a company. It’s now part of “X Corp.” Of course, Twitter is still “just” a social media platform, at least for now, but it may soon cast a much bigger shadow over society than it already does.
The big news is that Musk intends to broaden and deepen his reach into every aspect and activity of our lives. As he said at a Morgan Stanley audience in March, Musk sees transforming Twitter, or X app, into “the biggest financial institution in the world.” Your new checking and interest-bearing accounts might just be held at Twitter Bank and Loan—or X Corp. Bank—which may well be as sinister as it sounds.
Of course, there’s more to it than creating a new, hyper-connected financial juggernaut out of Twitters’ hundreds of millions of users. There are even darker possibilities, perhaps even probabilities, for turning X into an overarching spying and coercive force. That’s not hyperbole, either.
Musk’s long-term vision for X is a mega- or super-app that resembles China’s giant, all-encompassing technology company Tencent and its WeChat app. WeChat now handles banking, ride-hailing, food delivery services, and, yes, chatting, via smartphone.
But it’s also a part of China’s oppressive social credit system. It rewards and punishes users for behavior that has been deemed either positive or negative. Given the revelations that the U.S. government has been coordinating with tech and media companies in order to access your private data for years, why would they stop?
That may not be what Musk has in mind, but it might not matter. Governments have a way of compelling tech companies to do their bidding as a quid pro quo for allowing them to operate. That includes spying on your not-so-private data and using it however they may wish.
Aiding and abetting the totalitarian impulses of the federal government doesn’t appear to be on Musk’s agenda.
But you never know.
Everyone has their price, and Musk’s is very high. According to Musk’s own estimation, the potential value of X, once it has morphed into the multi-tentacled behemoth that he plans, could be valued as high as $250 billion, more than 10 times its current $22 billion valuation.
In retrospect, it’s clear that no one—not even Elon Musk—spends $44 billion just to stop the Deep State from censoring conservatives on Twitter. There had to be a much bigger play behind the buy.
And now we know what it is.
To his credit, Musk didn’t hide the fact that he had big plans for Twitter. Back in October 2022 he said that the Twitter acquisition was part of the plan to create X, the “everything app.”
The big question is, just because Musk can turn Twitter/X into a comprehensive app through which people run their entire lives, does it mean that it should be done?
More to the point, do we as individuals have a right to own our lives?
Do we still have the right to privacy in this country?
Do we really want our deepest personal conversations, what groceries we buy, what we talk about with our closest friends and relatives, or what we think about any given topic, to be accessible and monitored by X, and, likely, by extension, the federal government?
Does not Musk understand that what he’s pursuing is indistinguishable from what the Chinese Communist Party is doing right now to 1.4 billion people through apps and technology like WeChat?
That Musk would launch X to potentially monitor and control the very same people whose right to speak freely over social media he so passionately defended tells a much different story about his motivation than the free speech mantra he preached when he bought Twitter.
When thinking about technology these days, the most basic question is, “Who’s in control?”
This question is a pressing one given the very real risk that artificial intelligence (AI) poses to freedom and individuality in our society. Musk sees the threat that AI poses quite clearly.
Does Musk imagine that such an instrument of total control and denial of rights that X could well become would not be used against him at some point?
Does he think that his vast wealth makes him immune from the totalitarian impulses of a one-party deep state?
This is the same state that had no problem illegally censoring speech, arbitrarily closing businesses, enforcing potentially harmful vaccine mandates, suspending valid rental contracts, and closing churches for its own narrow purposes.
Perhaps Musk should have a chat with his ultra-wealthy Chinese counterparts such as Alibaba’s Jack Ma, banking tech billionaire Bao Fan, or real estate tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, all of whom criticized the Chinese regime in one fashion or another until they just disappeared one day and weren’t seen for weeks or even months.
How is Musk’s warning about AI taking over our society really much different than the risk that X is to us all?
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.