By
Svetlana Soroka
April 18th, 2024
Gates said he is impressed with the stellar performance of Musk in putting up a very good team of engineers at Tesla and SpaceX, but he doubts he can do the same with Twitter.
Billionaire tech pioneer Bill Gates has shared his doubts about the plans Elon Musk has for Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) as the latter nursed plans to permit free speech that he claims has been absent from the platform for a long time now. Bill Gates, speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Summit Wednesday noted Musk’s plans to revitalize the social media platform are unclear, and he also highlighted the concerns he has about the spread of misinformation on these platforms.
The concerns Gates has about the assumption of Musk as the new owner of Twitter are not hinged on the fact that the latter is not an excellent innovator. In fact, Gates said he is impressed with the stellar performance of Musk in putting up a very good team of engineers at both his electric vehicle company Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA), and SpaceX, but he doubts he can do the same with Twitter.
“I kind of doubt that will happen this time, but we should have an open mind and never underestimate Elon,” he said.
These comments further highlight the spat between both rich men as Musk recently accused Gates of shorting Tesla stocks despite his broad acclaim to support climate initiatives. On the part of Gates, permitting free speech can significantly spread falsehood about the efficacies of vaccines and other drugs that can save human lives.
While Gates believes the fact that some leaders are not speaking up to defend vaccine distribution is a big challenge, he has also highlighted the role of these social media platforms in frustrating the concerted efforts from the government.
“When you don’t have the trusted leaders speaking out about vaccines, it’s pretty hard for the platform to work against that,” he admitted. “So I think we have a leadership problem and we have a platform problem.”
Bill Gates Questioning Musk’s Free Speech Motives
Bill Gates is getting used to being accused of a range of sinister agendas with his drug and vaccination campaigns on social media, and he is calling out Musk on how he would feel about some of these wrong assumptions that can be propagated on his platform.
“How does he feel about something [on Twitter] that says ‘vaccines kill people’ or that ’Bill Gates is tracking people?”, Gates asked. “What are his goals for what it ends up being? Does that match this idea of less extreme falsehoods spreading so quickly [and] weird conspiracy theories? Does he share that goal or not?”
Gates believes the real ingenuity in engineering will be to create an algorithm that can only aid factual information to spread. While he has asserted that the ingenuity of Elon Musk should not be underrated, time will tell on how Elon Musk will transform the bird app, and whether he will make it better or worse.