Elon Musk is now in control of Twitter.
Kari Lake, who soon hopes to be in control of Arizona’s governorship, has invited Musk to move Twitter’s headquarters to Arizona.
Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, immediately made changes Friday after completing his purchase of the social media platform and taking it private.
He fired CEO Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and pledged to make Twitter an open public forum rather than a left-wing echo chamber that silences conservatives.
Lake suggested another change: Leave the Silicon Valley orbit of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for the better business environment of Arizona.
“Hey @elonmusk — you have an open invitation to move @Twitter HQ to Arizona. DM me and we’ll work it out!” the Republican gubernatorial candidate tweeted Friday, using the abbreviation for direct message.
Hey @elonmusk — you have an open invitation to move @Twitter HQ to Arizona
DM me and we’ll work it out!
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) October 28, 2022
She might be on to something. The Phoenix area would be a good option.
Do you think Musk should move Twitter HQ out of California?
Yes: 100% (2214 Votes)
No: 0% (10 Votes)
Most anywhere would be an improvement over California, a reality many individuals and businesses are acting upon — including Musk, who moved Tesla’s and SpaceX’s headquarters to Texas.
Arizona offers more than a lower cost of living, lower taxes and a friendlier business environment for the company and its employees.
It could get Twitter away from the insular Silicon Valley mindset that morphed it from a free-exchange communication platform to one of draconian censorship.
After all, the platform shut down messages and banned accounts questioning transgenderism and COVID-19 claims, and it even banned Donald Trump while he was the sitting president of the United States.
It’s not just Twitter. It seems all of the masters of the universe on San Francisco Bay and in the adjacent Silicon Valley view the world the same way.
They’re much like the slave-holders of the antebellum South, according to classicist scholar, military historian and California farmer Victor Davis Hanson, writing in The New Criterion.
“Under both systems a tiny elite assumed that its wealth and power were a result of superior wisdom and morality, and so naturally felt entitled to establish social mores and public policy in general,” Hanson said.
In Silicon Valley, he said, like in the old South, there has been an obsession with race; a single political party influenced by concentrated wealth; a lone dominant industry — Big Tech as opposed to Big Cotton; a servant class — imported H-1b engineers always subject to deportation who, like black slaves, undercut earnings of free American workers; and neglect of local infrastructure not relevant to interests of the plantation/tech industry.
Hanson also pointed to the effects globalization; nullification of federal laws through sanctuary cities; and a mentality of secession from what are viewed as the uncouth deplorables of middle America.
So Lake’s suggestion that Twitter uproot itself from California and move to Arizona might push along Musk’s vision of a social media platform set free from its tunnel vision.
But will it work? After all, you can take the boy out of the country, but can you take the country out of the boy? You can take Twitter out of the Silicon Valley area, but can you take the Silicon Valley out of Twitter?
It’s worth a try. And changed up a bit, it’s got a nice ring to it: from Silicon Valley to the Valley of the Sun.
Elon Musk is unconventional enough to maybe think along these lines.
