Dear Mr. Musk,
I am the CEO of a nonprofit, and I have a proposal for you: Instead of merely rendering Twitter unprofitable, why not channel the disruptive innovation you’re famous for and turn the social-media platform into an actual nonprofit?
Hear me out. During your brief tenure at its helm, more than half of Twitter’s staff have quit or been fired, and your whimsical antics are scaring away advertisers in droves. While the company may yet survive all this, the public good — and your reputation — would be far better served by transforming Twitter from a platform rife with trolls and hate speech into a trusted, independent nonprofit. Such a move would make you an instant hero and could do as much good for the public discourse as Tesla does for the climate.
I recognize that running a company with upwards of 200 million users at the center of the cultural zeitgeist is kind of a kick for you. But this is about more than fun and games. While Twitter accommodates an abundance of misinformation and inanity, it also enables countless journalists, activists, authors, nonprofits, and government agencies to connect and share information with the public and each other. “Twitter is the closest thing the world has to a transnational public sphere,” wrote Kenya-based author Nanjala Nyabola this month in the Nation.
After making an impulsive $44 billion investment, it’s not surprising that you want to undertake cost-saving measures. But some of us have concerns about how you’re going about achieving them. Nyabola notes that as soon as you took over, you fired Twitter’s human-rights team, the entire India team, everyone who worked for the company’s Ghana division in Africa, and the engineers who oversaw efforts to make the site more accessible to people with disabilities.
You could continue this approach and eventually strip Twitter of the very things that make it a valued resource across the globe, or you could choose the nonprofit path. The latter would allow you to create a powerful model for other innovators to follow — especially those with tremendous wealth.
Consider that nonprofits remain among America’s most trusted institutions during a time of deep distrust in government and corporate entities, including Congress, the Supreme Court, and, importantly, the tech industry.
There is also precedent for communications companies becoming nonprofits. A notable example is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was established under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and helped launch both National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. NPR and PBS are independent nonprofits that receive 10 to 15 percent of their funding from the federal government, with the rest derived from charitable contributions and sponsors.
Crucially, rather than commercials, they run brief statements from major underwriters, which are governed by Federal Communications Commission restrictions and truth-in-advertising laws. This reduces the likelihood that, say, fossil-fuel companies can launder their reputations through advertising, as they have done on several news sites, and, of course, on Twitter.
So how might this work? As it did with the establishment of NPR and PBS, Congress could pass legislation that allocates funding to turn Twitter into a special nonprofit. Given bipartisan concerns about the harms of social media, and the extent to which the public interest would be served by an unbiased platform that fosters positive dialogue, this is not an unfathomable outcome.
If you’d rather not work with Congress, you have another option: restructure the company into a nonprofit yourself. You could follow the lead of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who, along with his family, recently transferred ownership of the approximately $3 billion company to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization focused on combating climate change. Twitter would then be governed by a diverse, independent board of directors receiving no compensation and charged with serving the greater good — not a small set of profit-motivated shareholders.
Taking away the imperative to generate a profit — and let’s face it, that ship has likely sailed — could allow the nonprofit Twitter to reverse the monetization of attention and outrage that has made the social media-driven internet so damaging. Instead, Twitter’s engineers — many of whom would likely flock back to a mission-oriented version of the platform — could focus on the public interest, for instance by running campaigns that encourage vaccination and voting or fight climate disinformation. And like NPR and PBS, nonprofit Twitter could supplement grant dollars with revenue from advertising in a way that doesn’t distort its own work or harm society.
While the extent of social media’s harm is a matter of debate, there’s no question that bad actors such as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have weaponized Twitter and other platforms to drive a hateful agenda. It’s time to short-circuit the social-media business model that turns information and personal data into a commodity sold to advertisers and influence peddlers.
A nonprofit model wouldn’t solve all of Twitter’s problems. The nonprofit world is famous, after all, for its cash-flow struggles. But it would open the door to a different vision of the internet, more akin to nonprofits such as Wikipedia and the Signal and Mozilla foundations than the extractive practices of Facebook, Google, and Amazon. What’s more, Twitter has a 15-year history and a devoted user base to leverage as it embarks on a nonprofit experiment.
Mr. Musk, you have already spurred a movement to electrify vehicles, brought down the cost of battery-storage and solar-panel technologies, and pioneered private spaceflight. Now you have a unique opportunity to reclaim and make real what Tim Berners-Lee, known at the founder of the world wide web, saw as the original vision of the internet: “an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries”
In the modern world, there is no more powerful tool for good or ill than information. And social media is how billions of people access, share, and respond to ideas and current events. While you can’t know what direction this Twitter would ultimately take, as a nonprofit you could rest assured that it would remain accountable to its mission, users, and the broader society. You could also expect near-universal acclaim, a tax write-off, and a legacy secured for generations to come. Given a choice between that outcome and spending every waking hour shoveling water from a sinking ship, I’d go with the former if I were you.