On Friday, April 8, entrepreneur and bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy joined The Daily Wire’s Morning Wire to discuss Elon Musk’s purchase of 9% of Twitter’s stock and what it means for free speech online.
The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
MW: So, Vivek, we’ve now got Elon Musk getting invited on the governing board of Twitter. First, how significant is this development?
VIVEK: I think this is pretty interesting because he’s paving a path that I think might be the most promising path for driving cultural change in corporate America and in the market more generally; it is not through divestments or through boycotts. It is actually through representing the voice of everyday citizens and everyday shareholders.
I don’t know what Elon Musk is actually going to be able to do with a 9.2% stake, or if it will tilt the scales at Twitter by very much, but I think that he has paved the path for a really interesting mechanism that I predict we’re going to see a lot more of. That is shareholder activism addressing the problem of the marriage of progressive orthodoxy in big business.
MW: What does it mean for Twitter more broadly?
Vivek: Twitter and other social media companies have engaged in viewpoint-based censorship. And a lot of people, I’m one of them, believe that that’s a real problem. Now there’s three avenues for addressing that. One is state action, and I think you’re seeing that from some of the states, like a Florida statute that was passed about a year and a half ago. You’re seeing federal discussions about it. That’s one track. Another track that we’ve actually seen blossom is the competition avenue where you have other social media platforms like Parler or Truth Social that are aiming to take on Twitter through the marketplace. That is really hard to do. There’s all kinds of algorithms that you have set up as an existing behemoth that make it really hard in a natural monopoly business. And a social network is a natural monopoly business. It makes it really hard for new incumbents.
So I’m not optimistic that those are gonna make a difference, which actually brings me back to, then, what Elon Musk did. What he’s doing is actually bringing true diversity and true competition, not to the marketplace of products, but to the marketplace of ideas in the boardroom of the company. And so he took a 9.2% stake [last week].
MW: So you’re describing effectively a proactive move rather than a defensive one – adding influence as a shareholder rather than, say, staging a boycott?
VIVEK: Exactly. And this is a big part of what the ESG movement has done. A lot of people focus on the so-called ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance factors) movement in capital markets as being focused on not investing in gun manufacturers or whatever. That’s a small part of it. The real issue isn’t that firms like BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager who manages over $10 trillion of American citizens’ money, is divesting from companies like Exxon.The real problem is that they’re invested in companies like Exxon, and they vote for new boards of directors as they did last year, voting for three new board members. That changed the purpose of that company from being about drilling oil, to being about doing something else. They say drill less oil, do something else. Well, guess what? I think that that is distorting the behavior of companies across corporate America. In part because BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, those are three of the largest asset managers, they don’t actually represent the shareholders. They’re not the shareholders. They’re the stewards of other people’s money. Everyday citizens’ money. What makes the Elon Musk move really interesting is he’s showing up as an actual shareholder with his money. Now, he’s the top shareholder of Twitter, who’s going to say that I actually, as the shareholder and owner of the company, want to see that company heading in a different direction.
MW: And in this way, as you note, Musk is countering the ESG movement. For those not familiar with the term, ESG, can you define it for us?
VIVEK: Yeah. So it is basically a three-letter acronym that is designed to bore you into submission, to lull you into submission. And it is successful in doing that for most Americans. But it is basically a political ideology that says that companies are supposed to take action to advance particular agendas, especially environmental factors like fighting climate change. An advocate of the ESG movement will tell you that it is through the market itself that we need to solve the problem.
What ESG does is say, “Forget the political process, let’s just do this, get this done through the market where people work, where they bank, where they invest, and we can achieve that worldview without the pesky constraints of the constitution or the lawmaking processes that stop us from achieving a more just world. If politics is going to stop us, if the constitution is going to stop us, and the checks and balances are going to stop us, let’s just do it through the market instead.” That’s really what this is all about.
Listen to the full interview here:
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.