It was a breaking news alert to lift the spirits and make the heart sing. A tech billionaire arrested as he stepped off his private jet and detained by the French authorities. Happy days!
Because while the UK police have been charging individuals who incited violence online during this summer’s riots, the man who helped to fuel its flames – Elon Musk – has simply tweeted his way through it.
It turned out – because you can’t have it all – that the man arrested and subsequently charged in France this week was not Elon. It was his bro-in-arms, Pavel Durov, an Elon-alike who founded the encrypted messaging app Telegram, though for the casual observer it can be hard to tell where Durov ends and Musk begins.
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Because just as history is told by the winners, here’s the thing about owning your own global speech platform: you get to control whose speech is heard. And in Musk’s case, that means him. He gets to tell the story. He controls the narrative. And he has already broadcast his version of Durov’s arrest and the court proceedings in Brazil to his 196 million followers. He is the ultimate arbiter of “truth”.