A bird in the hand: Elon Musk buys Twitter

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm Jon Fassman. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Between 2000 and 2018, 60,000 minors under the age of consent were married in America. We speak with one of them, and ask why there's so little appetite for reform to child marriage laws.

And one astronaut has compared fixing panels on the International Space Station to doing car repairs while riding a skateboard and wearing heavy oven mitts. Spacesuits are cumbersome and can weigh up to 300 pounds. A better alternative may be one small step away.

First up, though.

Breaking news right now.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter.

Twitter accepting Elon Musk's buyout offer in an all-cash deal.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has clinched a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion.

After weeks of intrigue, cryptic messages, and corporate jockeying, Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX and Tesla, has struck a deal to buy Twitter. Free speech advocates will like Mr. Musk's plan for the social media platform. Earlier this month at this year's TED conference, he hinted at his plans.

Well, I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech. Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square.

Not everyone is thrilled with the idea of a less restrictive Twitter. Many worry that less moderation will mean more hate speech, misinformation, trolling. And as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki hinted after news of the deal broke, governments and regulators around the world will have their say on just how free the speech can be.

No matter who owns or runs Twitter, the president has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms. The power they have over our everyday lives has long argued that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause.

What's clear is that the headline-grabbing Mr. Musk is happy spending eye-watering sums to find and test those limits.

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has just successfully bid to take Twitter private. It's one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in history. It's worth about $44 billion.

Tom Wainwright is our media editor.

And if it's a big deal in business terms, it's arguably an even bigger deal in terms of what it means for the way that speech online is regulated.

But this is not anything like his core businesses, right? This is not Tesla. This is not SpaceX. What's his interest in owning Twitter?

You're right. It's pretty different. I mean, Twitter, although it's one of those businesses that we're all familiar with and it's fantastically famous and influential, it's not a hugely attractive business for investors. We talk about it in the same breath as companies like Facebook, but actually, if you look at the size of it, it's, you know, about a tenth the size of Facebook in terms of the number of daily users that it has. It's smaller even than TikTok, smaller than Snapchat. In business terms, It's really struggled to grow. What Elon Musk has made pretty clear is that he's not interested in it as a business. He's interested in it really more from the point of view of free speech. I mean, he's explicitly said he doesn't care about the economics of Twitter. What he is interested in, he says, is trying to preserve and improve it as a sort of forum where people can trade ideas freely. And he has implied that as its new owner, he would like to free up the way in which speech on the platform is policed.

Why does he think he needs to do that though? What's wrong in his view with the way speech is policed now?

Well, I think his view is that speech is being more tightly policed than it was a few years ago. And I mean, he's right about that. It's true on Twitter and it's true on all the social media platforms. They've all been through this kind of journey where if you go back many years, they all took the view that, you know, speech should be free and they wanted to take a step back and they were just a platform, not a publisher and all of this. But then two things happened. One was the government of Donald Trump, in which You had a president saying extraordinary inflammatory and transparently untrue things on Twitter and other platforms, claiming that elections were rigged. And then after that, you had the pandemic in which misinformation was spread online and had a pretty clearly directly harmful effect on people's health. These experiences have persuaded people that many social networks, including Twitter, that actually free speech has downsides after all. And so we've seen them all taking action including banning people from the platform, including most famously Donald Trump himself. And during the pandemic, we've seen them labeling content as being misleading or untrue, deleting posts more readily. And if you look at the amount of content that Twitter has been moderating, in the first half of last year, which is the latest figures that we have, they removed 5.9 million pieces of content, i.e., tweets, presumably. Two years earlier, the figure was 1.9 million. So a big increase in the amount of content being taken down. Now, Many people think that's a good thing. Many people think it's a bad thing. But Elon Musk is right when he says that speech is more closely policed now than it was in the past.

And so his idea is simply to make things freer, let all of those things bloom, the misinformation and the incitements and what have you.

I think up to a point, yeah. I mean, he says he wants to defeat the spam bots, you know, so presumably that's one bit of free speech that he doesn't want. But he has said, for example, that he's not keen on permanent bans from Twitter. He thinks that people should be put in what he calls timeouts if they break the rules, which implies obviously that people including Donald Trump could be in for a reinstatement onto the platform. He has said that he wants to make Twitter's code transparent and public, including its algorithm, which would be interesting. It would mean that people would know how and why particular tweets get seen more prominently than others, which ones are suppressed, which ones are promoted. And he said it in business terms that he wants to try and move away from advertising, which is what Twitter currently relies on for nearly all its revenue. And experiment more with a subscription model.

And I have to say, on Twitter, it's very clear that Twitter users are extremely worked up by this, mostly towards the negative. How do you think this is going to go down with them?

Well, I mean, I think that's true. Of course, you've got to be careful on Twitter because everybody has their own bubble. YouGov in the States did a poll earlier this month, and they found that 54% of Republicans thought that the buyout was a good idea for society, whereas only 7% of Democrats thought the same. But I think it is true that Twitter users overall lean Democratic as opposed to Republican. Republican. I mean, polling shows that that's true. So a huge, huge divide there along party lines. And so, yeah, we have seen, you know, so far it seems that reaction on the whole among Twitter users is less enthusiastic than the reaction among members of Twitter's board and Twitter shareholders. So it'll be interesting to see whether people stick on the platform as they've tended to do in the past, or whether there's any kind of move away from it.

But Twitter, of course, works in a great many jurisdictions. What happens when his free speech maximalism does come up against the law?

Well, you're right. I mean, it operates all over the world, and the picture is becoming much more complicated and much more fragmented because different countries are going about setting laws on the subject in different ways. I mean, just at the end of last week, we saw the European Union come to a provisional agreement on a new bill, which it's calling the Digital Services Act, which includes new obligations on social networks to moderate content more closely. Here in the UK, the government is putting together a new bill which would police online speech even more closely. And so social networks, including Twitter, are going to face this difficult decision where they are going to find themselves having to comply with some pretty strict rules in some countries and some jurisdictions and decide whether or not to apply those rules across the board globally.

And what's your view on this unusual situation of a fairly active user, a person with some vested interests in other industries having the keys to this particular kingdom?

Well, I think we should bear in mind that media owners aren't always wholly disinterested individuals. People like Rupert Murdoch spring to mind who own powerful media companies and have other commercial interests. And this isn't an entirely new problem in that sense. But I think people are sensitive about the idea that Twitter, which people see as a kind of public square where anybody can say what they like and where people can trade ideas, is now going to be owned by the world's richest man, who has all kinds of other interests of his own, whether that's cars or rockets or any number of other things. We've already seen that on other social networks, you have this conflict of interest where senior executives are in charge of both setting moderation policies and in charge of trying to make the company grow faster. If you have a situation where Elon Musk himself is getting deeply involved in the details of what can and can't be said online, while also obviously running these other companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, there could be conflicts there. For example, at the moment in China, where Tesla would probably probably like to sell more electric vehicles. The Chinese government finds that state media is labeled by Twitter, you know, there are warning labels on Chinese media. Chinese government would probably quite like that not to be the case. Now, if Elon Musk is in charge of deciding whether or not those labels stay or go, and he's also in charge of trying to persuade the Chinese government to allow him to do business more easily in China, there's a pretty obvious conflict of interest there. And you're going to find loads of examples of this where Musk's other business interests are going to overlap with decisions that he has to take regarding this new Twitter platform.

Tom, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

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When I was 15, it was decided that I was going to marry this family friend who was 22 or 23.

A decade ago, April Kelly's life changed forever.

I didn't really have any say. And then within, I would say, 12 hours, definitely within 24 hours, we were headed from CrossFit Arkansas to Alton, Missouri, where I was married to this man with my mother's permission.

There was no way for her to predict what being married at 15 would mean.

As soon as we got back into Arkansas, we— he and I were in a hotel room and he took my virginity. And then from there, it was just a year-long, I don't know, hostage situation is kind of what I call it. I was isolated from all my friends. I couldn't do extracurriculars. I couldn't I couldn't have a job. I couldn't do a lot of things that, you know, normal kids do.

April's case isn't rare. She's one of many young teenage girls to have been coerced into a marriage in America.

Most states in America have a statutory minimum marrying age of 18. But in some senses, that doesn't really mean very much because most also have exceptions.

Meighan Ridge is our U.S. social affairs correspondent.

Most commonly, a parent can give consent for a child to be married, or a judge can approve a marriage. And that means that teens can marry much younger than the statutory marrying age. Missouri, where April was married, is one of 14 states that give county clerks rather than judges the power to issue marriage licenses for minors. And there are 9 states that have no lower marrying limit at all.

So in plenty of places, it's very easy then for minors to get married. How many— how many are there?

There's no sort of central database of marriages or the age at which Americans are married, but a study that was published last year by Unchained at Last, which is an advocacy group that campaigns against forced marriages across all ages, estimated that close to 300,000 minors were married in America between 2000 and 2018, and 60,000 of them were under their state's age of consent laws. We know from that report that the vast majority of minors who marry are girls. I think it's 86%, many of the marriages are prompted by religious beliefs or are immigration-related. And the study used data provided by the states, which didn't give breakdowns on things like ethnicity or religion. But people who work in this field says that it happens across all groups. And it's important to keep in mind here that the data that exists is patchy. Some states didn't provide any data, or some provided very sparse data. So this is almost certainly a very big undercount.

So again, it's easy for lots of minors to end up married, uh, and plenty do. Is it equally easy for them to get out of these marriages?

It's unfortunately not. It's very difficult as a minor to get a divorce. So for April, it was difficult from the very beginning.

I knew that I'd always been told if I go away that they'll make me go back, but he's like— because he's like my legal guardian.

But so if you can't get a divorce, what do you do? Domestic violence shelters tend not to accept lone children. They would be more likely considered runaways. and the police may try to return them home. April did eventually run away after her father-in-law assaulted her.

I literally grabbed everything I owned, which wasn't much anyways, just some clothes and school stuff and a couple CDs and my Walkman, you know, like I had barely anything.

But then she struggled to get legal advice.

I called a bunch of lawyers and nobody would help me, but this one lady, uh, who I don't even know her name, she sent me some papers. They were basically just like divorce papers for free.

Few lawyers will take on child clients, even if the child has the means to pay them or access to a phone to speak to them or, or the ability to turn up at meetings. So contracts with children under many state laws are voidable. Divorcing as a minor in April's case involved being emancipated by the state, which meant that she effectively became a legal adult at the age of 16 with all the burdens and responsibilities that being an adult involves. She funded college, She worked to cover her costs and has ever since then. And all those things have happened at a much younger age than would happen to most Americans.

And in April's case, as in many others, I'm sure that that sets them back on a life path. All of this has got in the way of the normal business of being young.

America has said a lot about why and how young marriage is a very bad idea. The State Department's Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls, which was launched in 2016, described forced marriages under the age of 18 as a human rights abuse. It was talking to the poor and the developing world. But within America, girls who marry before the age of 19, research shows, are 50% more likely to drop out of high school. April told me that her marriage changed her life for the worse, and in ways she believes to be irreversible.

Me being kept out of school all that time did affect my eventual GPA, which affected my ability to get a full scholarship, which I think I would have gotten She's worked incredibly hard, and as she says, she's really tried her very best.

But she obviously wonders what she might have achieved if she'd been allowed to continue her education as part of a normal childhood.

So given all of this, why is— why is child marriage still legal?

So the main reason that lawmakers failed to press for reform is because the number of marrying minors has fallen dramatically in recent decades. So the census shows that in 1960, a little under 7% of American girls aged between 15 and 17 were married. Today it's much, much less than a percent, so it's just not a priority for lawmakers. There's also resistance to reforms from both sides. America is still a relatively religious country, and some people do think that marriage is the best way to deal with a teen pregnancy, say. There are concerns about religious and civil liberty, and of course some teens do want to marry very young. What campaigners say to that is there's no harm in having to wait a couple of years. The harms of marrying young are certainly greater than the harms of having to wait. But push for reform is having some success. In recent years, at least 24 states have passed laws to limit child marriage, and in the past 4 years, so really very recently, 6 states have eliminated all the exemptions that allow minors to marry before 18. So that's good news, and there is progress. But while minors like April are still vulnerable, it's not enough reform. You know, child protection, child safeguarding is not a numbers game. It's not something that stops when the numbers go down. So more states do need to reform their laws.

I feel personally taken advantage of by the system before I even had a chance to even understand it. I definitely think that there needs to be federal legislation to end child marriage where you have to be 18 no matter what.

Meighan, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks very much, Jason.

Floating through the absence that is space sounds relaxing. You leave Earth and enter orbit. You unbuckle your harness, don a spacesuit, and glide weightless from your ship. With the Earth, a blue marble below, you're free, as former President Ronald Reagan once put it, to touch the face of God. But touching, and for that matter, any other movement, proves more difficult than you imagined.

Spacesuits today are very bulky. In fact, since the Apollo program in the 1960s and '70s, they've gained about a third more weight.

Benjamin Sutherland writes about technology for The Economist.

So they're cumbersome, they're hard to maneuver, and there's been a lot of R&D and effort and expertise being put into trying to figure out a way to improve the situation.

So Ben, let's start by getting a sense of what it's actually like inside a spacesuit.

Well, I spoke to two astronauts while I was researching the story. One of them was Kate Rubins. She spent hundreds of days orbiting Earth on the International Space Station, and she gave me a feel for just how difficult it is to be inside a spacesuit.

So it is almost like you're putting on a different person when you get into the suit, and that can be very cumbersome. So it's like squeezing yourself through the smallest hole that you could possibly fit through. You almost do this thing where you double-joint your elbows to get your elbows through. So it's actually kind of problematic. We've had a lot of suit injuries just from donning and doffing this suit because—

Even if you're in the weightlessness of space, it still takes force to move it, and it's bulky. And that makes it very difficult to not just move around, but especially to operate equipment or tools.

You know, you go from kind of walking around knowing what your dimensions are of your body to all of a sudden you're a couple feet broader shoulders and your helmet visor bubble sticks out in front of your face quite a bit. So the actual dimensions of the person change a lot and you're having to deal with all this.

In fact, one thing she said was that fixing solar panels on the ISS is like doing car repairs while you're wearing stiff oven gloves and standing on a skateboard.

Is NASA working on refining this in any way? Is it happy with the suits as they now stand?

NASA has been putting a lot of money into it, and in fact, was criticized last August by Paul Martin, NASA's Inspector General, saying that they had spent 14 years and about $420 million trying to build the next generation spacesuit, and they had essentially failed. At that point, NASA pivoted and decided to outsource much more of the R&D to other companies. They asked for proposals, and on May 31st are going to announce the winner, a company or a group of companies that will receive a fat contract to design and build the actual suits.

So there's a competition to design the next spacesuit. What sorts of parameters has NASA set? What does it want to see in the new suits?

They've got to allow for much more fluid body movement. A lot of the companies involved in this are being very secretive about what they're doing, but we do know I do know about suit design proposed by 3 American firms: Collins Aerospace, ILC Dover, and Oceaneering. And they are working on a suit they call Astro, which will make abundant use of Vectran, which is a synthetic liquid crystal polymer fiber stronger than Kevlar. And they say that astronauts wearing this would be able to put their hands over their head and bend down, which is something astronauts in today's suits cannot do. They're gonna have various versions of the suit, including for moonwalks, and they say that astronauts on the moon would probably be able to walk in this suit about 10 kilometers, and that's much, much farther than the Apollo astronauts could manage back in the day.

And what about other ideas beyond just suits for space maneuverability?

So there's a very interesting firm in Maryland called Genesis Engineering Solutions, And their approach is to get rid of spacesuits altogether and put a person in a miniature single-person spacecraft. It'll have thrusters, robotic arms from a company that makes robotic arms for bomb defusal. And not only are the robotic hands much more dexterous than anything that could be done by an astronaut in a glove, but if the astronaut were incapacitated, the whole system could be brought back by remote control.

So could this be the end of spacesuits altogether?

Probably not. For one thing, the miniature spacecraft is gonna cost about $70 million a pop, although it could end up being less expensive over time. And people are working on a number of ways to make spacesuits more viable. ILC Dover is planning to cut costs by setting up a system with an umbilical cord that would make it cheaper than having the life support backpack. On the system. But perhaps most broadly, there's a certain amount of pushback within the astronaut community about this idea of roboticizing everything and reducing the role of astronauts. Keep in mind, part of the whole excitement about space exploration is the fact that these are humans up there. So I don't see spacesuits disappearing anytime soon.

All right, Ben, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.