Glenn Greenwald finds ‘silver lining’ in the Elon Musk, Twitter deal fallout
Glenn Greenwald speaks with Fox News Digital about the imploding multi-million dollar deal between the Tesla CEO and social media giant.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald remains hopeful that Elon Musk will still take over Twitter despite the deal's current turmoil that has led the tech giant to sue the billionaire Tesla CEO.
Musk is attempting to withdraw his $44-billion bid to buy Twitter due to the company allegedly not being forthcoming on its data regarding how many bots are on the platform, while Twitter is taking Musk to court in order to force him to honor the deal.
Speaking with Fox News Digital at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Greenwald insisted that even if the deal falls through, a "silver lining" was witnessing the utter "hysteria" from the establishment that Musk's takeover attempt ignited.
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Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald speaks at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas on July 13, 2022. (Fox News Digital)
"I find silver linings in any episode that is illuminating about how our culture and politics actually function. And I can't recall any that was quite as illuminating as this Elon Musk episode because all he really did that caused so much indignation and panic on the part of establishment circles was say he wanted to restore some residue of free speech back to a major internet platform," Greenwald said.
He continued, "And simply by virtue of promising to do that, there was this wave of neurosis and hysteria unlike anything I've ever seen. And I think that reveals something very important, which is how genuinely vital and valuable this weapon of online censorship has become to institutions of establishment authority. And even if nothing changes in terms of Twitter's ownership structure, that lesson is deeply valuable."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is attempting to pull is offer to by Twitter for $44 billion, which has caused the tech giant to take him to court. (Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Greenwald suggested that Musk's spat with Twitter is "just business" since he was "roped into a price" that was perhaps too high to begin with.
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"The idea that Twitter is this fundamentally different business than he thought it was because of bots prior to purchasing it only to discover the existence of bot at a much higher – no, that is not an actual thing that happened," Greenwald laughed. "That's totally a pretext to allow him to get out of a deal and negotiate a better price."
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald speaks at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas on July 13, 2022. (Fox News Digital)
The Substack journalist struggled to say whether Musk's takeover of Twitter will actually happen since the tech tycoon is "almost impossible to predict" but strongly backed the multi-billion-dollar transaction.
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"I hope, though, that he ends up owning Twitter because even if the changes are minimal, the mere fact that we will have somebody in control of one of the major social media platforms who has explicitly denounced the censorship regime that has consumed and continues to consume social media platforms I think will be very important," Greenwald said.
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