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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong at TechCrunch Disrupt 2018.
Billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk has brought free speech front and center amid his imminent takeover of Twitter.
Now, he’s finding support from the CEO of one of the crypto industry’s largest exchanges.
“Elon buying Twitter is a great win for free speech, and probably changes the trajectory of the world more than most people realize,” tweeted the CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong yesterday. “Twitter is upstream of media and culture in many ways, and it was trending in a very dangerous direction on censorship.”
Musk's Twitter takeover
Following a weeks-long back and forth, Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion bid to take over the company. The saga began with the Tesla and SpaceX CEO first acquiring a 9.2% stake in the social media platform on April 4. A day later, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced that Musk would join the Twitter board of directors.
On April 9, Musk informed Twitter that he would, in fact, not be joining the board. Then, just five days later, he made a formal offer to buy the company for $43 billion, tweeting, "Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it."
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His reasons for buying the company outright rather than working within its current form stem from concerns revolving around censorship, removing rampant spam bots, introducing an edit button, and turning Twitter’s code open-source.
However, achieving all this will be a “turnaround job,” added the Coinbase CEO in today’s thread. But offered Musk “props for executing on it and taking on the challenge in a way most people could not even contemplate.”
“Hopefully, Twitter can be converted to a decentralized protocol over time,” said Armstrong. That could yet happen; Bluesky, a Twitter-backed project to create an "open and decentralized standard for social media" instigated by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, announced that it was unaffected by Musk's purchase of the social media giant.
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