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By now you’ve likely seen the news that Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid to buy Twitter has been accepted. It’s obviously disturbing to see the world’s richest man engage in a self-indulgent crusade through spending enough money to end world hunger for the better part of a decade, while at the same time highlighting profound, fundamental flaws in our society. Just as Zuckerberg made Meta into an empire, and Bezos snapped up the Washington Post, Musk is joining the club of oligarchs who increasingly control what we see (and don’t see) online.

While Musk wants us to believe he’s buying Twitter to defend free speech, Musk’s own track record of union-busting and punishing whistle-blowers at a company he already owns, Tesla, proves he only values free expression to the extent it does not threaten his money or power.

We have no reason to believe that Palestinian voices or critics of US empire, marginalized by Twitter, will be restored by Musk or any other billionaire. We have little reason to hold faith that new oligarchical management will end policies like arbitrarily deciding which media outlets will be stigmatized as “state-affiliated,” or blocking the sharing of a scandal like Hunter Biden’s laptop leak under the guise of curtailing “disinformation.” And even if Musk were to rectify any or all of these examples to show the benevolence of his new regime, his track record and the imperatives of capitalism tell us it’s only a matter of time before he cracks down on voices that threaten his profits or personal agenda.

At this time, we do see MAGA-hat-wearing, Q-Anon conspiracy theorists celebrating the anticipated return of Donald Trump to the platform. Florida Governor Ron “Don’t Say Gay” DeSantis is praising Musk’s Twitter purchase in the hopes that his views, as the chief executive of America’s third largest state, at long last might finally “thrive.” Dog-whistle blowing, transphobic bigots are celebrating this as a victory for their hate speech.

Elon Musk owning Twitter is a danger to democracy. The previous group of plutocrats who governed Twitter were also a danger to democracy. That neoliberal Democrats and their media functionaries had no issue with one faction of the elite and, in fact, actively courts their favor, is not a benefit to our communities and movements for justice. Democratic Party elites will never meaningfully regulate billionaires, much less the world’s biggest billionaire. The Democrats have no problem taking money from billionaires in every election cycle!

While Democrats might publicly decry the influence of billionaires or the erosion of our media institutions, we have no reason to believe them any more than Musk’s commitment to free expression. When their next election cycle rolls around, Democrats want those billionaire donor dollars — including Elon Musk’s. They provide lip service to breaking up Big Tech media monopolies but run to those same companies to promote their own candidacies and suppress Green Party messages and candidates.

The Green Party has refused the corporate cash and oligarch bribes since our inception. That’s how you can trust we will stand by what we say and by you. But we’re fighting an increasingly uphill battle to simply get our message out to the public. The media might ignore and suppress our message, billionaires might dump mountains of money to combat our ideas, but we know we can reach out directly to engaged people like you to support and promote our campaigns for democracy, ecology, peace, and justice.

That is why it’s more important than ever to support the Green Party with your generous donation of $10, $15, $50 — or whatever you can give at this time.

Together we can show the billionaire class the power of the people. We can make a world free of billionaires, where we democratically govern the platforms we depend on to exchange ideas and express ourselves.

In Solidarity,
The Green Party of the United States
www.gp.org