Elon Musk is in a battle for who wants to own Twitter less

When Elon Musk first embarked on a collision course toward buying Twitter, he was talking about free speech—not money.

“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square,” Musk tweeted on March 26, “failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”

As Musk hastily accumulated shares of the publicly traded social media company—flaunting federal reporting requirements in the process—Musk repeatedly bad-mouthed Twitter as a censorious and undemocratic entity. (Musk’s views on free speech are largely contradictory: As a private company, Twitter has its own speech rights and can largely moderate user-generated content as it sees fit.)

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