Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Friday that he would welcome Elon Musk’s leadership of Twitter.
Though Musk had been attempting to cancel his deal to purchase the social media platform, earlier this week he suggested completing the transaction at the original $54.20 per share — an offer that Twitter appeared to accept before Musk indicated the company was changing course.
Paxton, who has filed multiple lawsuits against social media companies, remarked that he believes Musk would return free expression to the platform. “He appears to be a guy that wants free speech to reign on the Internet,” Paxton said during an interview with Fox News. “I welcome somebody getting into the marketplace that will just allow people to speak freely and not try to limit them based on what their political positions are or their religious positions.”
Kathaleen McCormick, the Delaware judge overseeing the merger, announced on Thursday night that she would delay legal proceedings by moving the original trial from October 17 to October 28, giving Musk the chance to complete the deal. The world’s richest man has repeatedly expressed concerns about the platform’s lackluster commitment to free expression.
“If we do not stop this, we are going to lose the ability to have practically free speech in this country,” Paxton said of censorship from technology conglomerates, “which means that there’s huge advantages for people that have more liberal views than there are for those that have more conservative views.”
Musk had attempted to nix the merger deal over a dispute about the platform’s true number of users, postulating that the actual share of fake accounts on the platform could range as high as 33% rather than the company’s reported 5%, with a lower number of monetizable daily active users justifying a lower valuation. Paxton opened an investigation against Twitter earlier this year to determine whether executives had been accurately reporting the metric.
“Texans rely on Twitter’s public statements that nearly all its users are real people. It matters not only for regular Twitter users, but also Texas businesses and advertisers who use Twitter for their livelihoods,” Paxton said. “If Twitter is misrepresenting how many accounts are fake to drive up their revenue, I have a duty to protect Texans.”
In recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, whistleblower and former Twitter cybersecurity czar Peiter Zatko claimed that executives lacked the resources or motivation necessary to determine the true number of fake accounts on the platform. McCormick had granted attorneys representing Musk permission to use Zatko’s testimony, which also asserted that one or more foreign agents were present within the company, during their arguments.
Paxton has been censored by Twitter himself after referring to Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine, a biological male who claims transgender identity, as a “man.” Twitter flagged the tweet and said that the message broke its standards regarding “hateful conduct.”
Though he has affirmed that Twitter users should be able to post “pretty outrageous things,” Musk appears to have little desire for polarizing discourse on the platform. He reportedly said during a meeting with Twitter employees that he wants to prioritize “freedom of speech,” but not necessarily “freedom of reach” — implying that extreme views will not receive amplification.