00:00:06.000It's acting like something that is not a for-profit company.
00:00:09.000We're going to explore that together in a very important episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
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00:00:38.000One last thing before we get started: Tuesday, April 19th at 6 p.m. at Bank of Springfield Center in Springfield, Illinois.
00:00:44.000I will be coming and speaking at a dinner.
00:00:46.000It's $100 per person, features a full dinner and a chance to support the local efforts of the Sangamon County Republican Party, the home of Abraham Lincoln.
00:01:23.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:29.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:17.000You could see how many shares are outstanding.
00:02:20.000You could see all sorts of different information about Twitter.
00:02:25.000However, it really does beg the question of whether or not it is actually a private company because evidence is showing it's actually a different type of thing.
00:02:34.000The type of thing that we are dealing with is very important.
00:02:38.000Twitter, as we know, is enthusiastic to censor political dissidents.
00:02:42.000We are still suspended from Twitter because we refuse to delete our tweet.
00:02:46.000Donald Trump has been kicked off Twitter, amongst many others.
00:02:49.000Tucker Carlson, the Babylon Bee, this has all prompted Elon Musk into action to try and acquire Twitter, and we'll get into the latest news around that.
00:03:00.000But we must study this carefully in case there might be a new type of thing coming onto the scene.
00:03:06.000Something that is not a for-profit company, but something instead that pretends to be a for-profit company, but acts like something completely different.
00:03:14.000And here's the evidence: is that a for-profit company would be deranged not to accept an offer much more valuable than what it's worth to sell to Elon Musk.
00:03:25.000Any businessman who actually just wants to make money would be enthusiastic about selling their company to Elon Musk.
00:03:35.000Instead, what's happening is the Twitter board has now put forward poison pill amendments.
00:03:42.000They're trying to do everything they possibly can to try and kill the deal with Elon Musk.
00:03:46.000Elon Musk is coming in with a $42 billion cash offer, and the board is coming up with every sort of argument.
00:03:54.000They're doing mental calisthenics, if you will, to try to block the offer that Elon Musk has put forward.
00:04:13.000Instead, they are a regime megaphone and a censorship machine that camouflages as a for-profit company.
00:04:21.000A for-profit company would be much more interested in trying to get the maximum for their shareholders.
00:04:27.000Instead, what you have at Twitter is ideologues disguised as capitalists.
00:04:33.000You have people that are left-wing activists that sit on the board of Twitter that almost own no shares collectively.
00:04:43.000Now, this is a very important point because if you're not dealing with a company and you take a step back, you say, well, all of a sudden, do market principles still apply to that company?
00:04:52.000You see, we have been led to believe that market principles drive all behavior, that people are going to want to get rich and make profit.
00:05:01.000And that is generally the case in most business transactions.
00:05:04.000In most business transactions and merger and acquisitions, you're dealing at the very end of it is who's going to make money, who's going to get paid and get them out of the deal.
00:05:13.000This has happened with some of the most famous merger and acquisitions, whether it be U.S. Airways merging with American Airlines, the biggest merger and acquisitions of the last decade, whether it be cell phone companies merging, whether it be Comcast and NBC merging into NBC Universal, all these different types of merger and acquisition trends over the last 20 years, usually it comes down to is, okay, I need more money, buy me out of my deal.
00:05:39.000You know, maybe you can guarantee the debt and let's move on.
00:05:44.000That's what happens when you have companies dealing with companies, but Twitter is a different type of thing.
00:05:53.000Some people might have got rich along the way.
00:05:55.000Jack Dorsey definitely made some money, but it changed as the type of thing it actually is in 2015 and 2016 and 2017.
00:06:03.000As Twitter metamorphosized and transformed from just being something that churns out money, like a restaurant or a dry cleaning store or an airline or a casino, it changed into something that was instrumental to the people in charge.
00:06:19.000It changed to something completely different because the people in charge of our country realized that Twitter, albeit might be a private company, it is, as Tucker Carlson puts it, the incubator for elite opinions.
00:06:32.000It's where the important people go to find out what they actually believe.
00:06:35.000Now, they don't independently find their own beliefs by reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, and thinking deeply about things, but instead, if enough blue check people on Twitter are saying something, it creates this overwhelming cacophony of opinion, and therefore that is what ends up being elite opinion.
00:06:52.000We have not seen this sort of power over discourse since the alleged cigar-filled rooms in Washington, D.C. of lobbyists and backslapping deal makers.
00:07:04.000We have not seen the type of power that a certain platform or company can have in recent memory.
00:07:10.000The closest would be what we were told of the Roman Senate of important people that go to hear themselves talk, and that's how they feel, how that's how they get the opinions of how they feel.
00:07:17.000You see this beautifully demonstrated in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where opinion can be quickly shaped and moved just based on who is saying it and when they are saying it.
00:07:28.000But no, Twitter is a propaganda organ of the regime and the globalist agenda.
00:07:33.000Robust free speech is a direct threat to that agenda.
00:07:37.000So we have to stop acting as if we're dealing with a company here.
00:07:40.000But that really should make you take pause and say, wow, are we still living under capitalistic market principles?
00:07:48.000If we were, the people in charge would be the people in charge of Twitter, the shareholders would just be, yes, not just the shareholders, the board of directors, because there is a difference.
00:08:15.000Now, to a pure market capitalist, which I am a market capitalist, but not in the puritanical sense, they would say that profits drive all behavior.
00:08:29.000That at the end of all this, and when it comes down to it, when the rubber meets the road, you can use whatever sort of filler term you want.
00:08:59.000What you're seeing play out at Twitter with their seeming rejection of Elon Musk's offer, and don't worry, Elon Musk has a plan B, and I'll tell you what that is, is they are sidelining the ability to get paid and what would be good for their shareholders and even their fiduciary duty.
00:09:15.000And they are elevating on the hierarchy ideology, power, and prestige, and loyalty to the machine.
00:09:26.000So many nefarious intentions have been exposed to what's unfolding at Twitter.
00:09:31.000We now learn that the people, the elites in our country, it's not that they hate the idea of rich people owning stuff.
00:09:39.000They just don't like the wrong rich people owning stuff.
00:09:41.000Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post, perfectly fine.
00:09:44.000Laurene Powell Jobs owning The Atlantic, perfectly fine.
00:09:46.000Elon Musk coming out and trying to buy Twitter, a threat to democracy.
00:10:24.000An unprecedented, unique, once-in-a-generation event where people decide not to get rich, but instead decide to remain loyal to an abstract ideology.
00:10:38.000Look, did you get hit with a big tax spill you were not expecting with rates still being very low and home equity being high?
00:10:45.000It's the perfect time to refinance and get some cash out of your home.
00:10:48.000Look, you could go to one of these woke banks, Citibank, Chase, where they hate you, they hate the country, and they hate Christianity.
00:10:56.000Or you could refinance right now all of your mortgage needs with my friends.
00:12:00.000And other people, they just want their ideology enacted.
00:12:05.000They're really living out the Twitter board, these group of activists, they're living out their belief by money is not as important as the ideology that they hold near.
00:12:19.000So, as a counter to all of this, it looks like Twitter has enacted a poison pill.
00:12:25.000Now, a poison pill was conceived by someone by the name of Martin Lipton, partner at the white-collar firm Wattel, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz.
00:12:34.000The poison pill is used to do one thing and one thing only: make a proposed acquisition like Elon Musk less appealing for the acquirer.
00:12:44.000The poison pill, named after deadly pills used by spies to avoid interrogation if they were captured, really came out of the scene in the 1980s as merger and acquisition lawyers came up the go-to defense against the feared corporate raider.
00:12:58.000Now, the most common thwarted takeover of a company would be Netflix.
00:13:02.000In 2012, Netflix successfully used a poison pill to fend off a takeover bid from Carl Icahn, one of the most famous corporate raiders in the 1980s, who is now worth over $16 billion.
00:13:27.000The significance is that this is not in the best interest of Twitter.
00:13:32.000It's not in the best interest of the shareholders.
00:13:34.000Now, if anyone out there owns Twitter stock, you should be calling lawyers and seeing what your options are.
00:13:43.000Because your ability to make money is now being thwarted by this poison pill strategy, and the fiduciary duty of the board has been put aside.
00:13:53.000Elon Musk has a plan B. In fact, Elon at a TED Talk last week said he does have a Plan B and he's going to be willing to use it.
00:14:03.000Now, before we get into what that Plan B would be and what it is, let's first talk about what the media thinks about all of this, and why does the media think the way they do?
00:14:16.000Well, on Cut 21, MSNBC is talking about Elon Musk.
00:14:42.000While unemployment and the economy worsens, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think.
00:15:42.000No, but as soon as Elon Musk wants to spend some of his own money on a platform that is increasingly less valuable with less users, everyone freaks out.
00:15:52.000Because they know what the world will look like under Elon Musk controlling Twitter.
00:15:58.000They know that people will be able to express themselves easily, that there will not be the sword of Damocles hanging above your head that might drop on you at any time if you dare say something incorrect, like what happened with us on Twitter.
00:16:10.000They also know that Elon Musk will do exactly what he said he would do in the Twitter shareholder letter, which is unlock Twitter's potential.
00:16:17.000Now, I know a lot of you listening right now are not big fans of Elon Musk.
00:16:21.000We have a split opinion on a lot of his stuff.
00:16:22.000I don't like how he does as much work as he does in China.
00:16:25.000I don't like the good things he says about China.
00:16:28.000Do I want to live in a country where the world's richest man has to swoop in and parachute in his spare time to try to buy a platform to liberate our speech?
00:16:38.000I wish we had a functioning government that actually protected the rights of the citizens to be able to speak online.
00:16:43.000But you have to deal with the cards that you have.
00:16:45.000You have to play with the team that you have fielded.
00:16:48.000What we have right now is the world's richest man that wants to do what the government should have done a long time ago, to do what the market should have done, who's now starting to realize that it's not actually dollar incentives that drives human behavior, but it's a group of people that are incentivized by power, prestige, and abstract ideology.
00:17:08.000Dinesh D'Souza has a real special movie coming out, everybody.
00:17:12.000In 2020, November 2020, Democrats were up to no good.
00:17:17.000They were planning to pull off one of the greatest schemes of election fraud never seen before, but they didn't think we would catch them, but we did.
00:17:24.000Find out what they did and how they did it in a new documentary film called 2000 Mules, directed and narrated by renowned filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, an executive produced by the Salem Media Group, with research from truthevote.org.
00:17:38.0002000 Mules is going to be a game changer.
00:17:40.0002000 Mules tells the story of the ones who tried to hijack a presidential election.
00:17:45.000You'll see actual video surveillance tape.
00:17:47.000You'll see how we track their cell phones to box after box after they got paid to carry out this illegal scheme.
00:18:21.000So Elon has a plan B. Elon has a backup plan.
00:18:25.000Since there was a poison pill executed, what other plan would he be able to put forward?
00:18:31.000Well, Elon Musk is tweeting rather, let's say publicly, and he says, love me tender, which of course is a song, and he's talking about a tender offer.
00:18:45.000In corporate finance, a tender offer is a type of public takeover bid.
00:18:49.000A tender offer is a public open offer or invitation, usually announced in a newspaper advertisement, by a prospective acquirer to all the stockholders of a publicly traded corporation to tender their stock for sale at a specific price during a specific time.
00:19:05.000In a tender offer, the bidder contacts shareholders directly.
00:19:09.000The directors of the company may or may not endorse the tender offer proposal.
00:19:16.000Now, the significance of this is that you would then be able to vote whether or not you want Elon Musk to be on the board.
00:19:23.000Might be a good time to go buy some Twitter shares just so that you might be able to vote on it.
00:19:28.000It doesn't matter what the board wants.
00:22:11.000If you're not able to have speech in that area for people like me to be able to contribute to that when we had our heyday, 1.8 million followers, then your entire civilization is just living through a simulation.
00:23:11.000You all kind of live in these vertical housing units under the oppression of some sort of tech tyrant.
00:23:19.000Cut 28, Elon Musk continues about saying that if I were to control Twitter, this is from a TED talk just recently, I want to be very reluctant to delete things and just be very cautious with permanent bans.
00:23:33.000I do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things and have just be very cautious with permanent bans.
00:23:44.000Timeouts, I think, are better than sort of permanent bans.
00:23:51.000But just in general, like I said, it won't be perfect, but I think we wanted to really have, like I said, the perception and reality that speech is as free as reasonably possible.
00:24:23.000If there was a free Twitter and Elon Musk was in charge, then there wouldn't have been COVID lockdowns the way that there were.
00:24:30.000If there was a free Twitter, then people would not have been able to have the same, they wouldn't have been as afraid of the virus as they otherwise would have been.
00:24:38.000We would have had robust discussion with people like Dr. Robert Malone, banned.
00:24:44.000Dr. Pierre Corey, censored, to be able to have a contrarian viewpoint when it came to COVID.
00:24:51.000With a free Twitter, we would not have had mass mail imbalance.
00:24:55.000You see, a free Twitter very well could have fixed some of our more frustrating structural issues.
00:25:03.000Because a free Twitter with a publicly published algorithm like we had in 2016 results in people being able to make independent decisions and challenge authority and not live in a place of fear.
00:25:15.000With a censored Twitter, people are far more likely to want to resort to a power structure, obey that power structure, and not think independently or freely.
00:25:28.000With a free Twitter or a free internet, you'll be able to search for any topic, issue at your choosing, and you will not have to feel as if you are being sandwiched between mandatory opinions as if there's people in charge that always want to keep you down.
00:25:48.000It is the kind of ultimate utopian idea of the marketplace of ideas.
00:25:53.000And dare I say, I would say it would be unachievable because people say, oh, they're so cynical.
00:26:35.000And all those super weirdo Huffington Post people that write columns all day long that no one reads, they were so angry that people like Charlie Kirk were able to amount a following.
00:26:48.000According to Axios in 2018, we had the third or fourth most engaged Twitter account on the planet because we understood the medium.
00:26:58.000It's when Twitter did not have the finger on the scale.
00:27:00.000It's when they weren't shadow banning thanks to James O'Keefe.
00:27:03.000We know that they were shadow banning.
00:27:05.000And slowly and surely, all of a sudden Twitter, the window started to close on the ability to freely express on Twitter.
00:27:13.000And it wasn't just the window to be able to freely express.
00:27:15.000It's that content wasn't able to spread at the same sort of virality it was previously.
00:27:22.000To go viral on Twitter was a lot harder because they totally changed the formula or the algorithm of what gets recognized and what actually spreads on their platform or as a publisher because they really are kind of a publisher.
00:27:36.000And so as the window closed and it closed and it closed, we started to realize that our country actually became less free.
00:27:43.000Is it any correlation that as Twitter became less free, so did the country?
00:28:21.000My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.
00:28:45.000He doesn't care about the economics at all.
00:28:46.000Now, it's amazing how Elon Musk has gone from idol of the left to the villain of the left.
00:28:52.000Isn't that amazing how quickly it can happen?
00:28:53.000Elon Musk, man of the year, time man of the year last year, quickly turns to now being a villain.
00:29:00.000Now, if Elon was saying he wanted to buy Twitter and make it more censored, in fact, he needs to have more sensibilities to the trans people or whatever, then people would be all for it.
00:29:12.000And what's so, and we don't know how this is going to play out.
00:29:14.000So anyone who's predicting, oh, I know how, you don't really know how it's going to work.
00:29:49.000Well, only one of them is really, let's say, held hostage by security laws, and that is Twitter.
00:29:57.000Musk can do whatever he wants until, and it's just by coincidence, of course, Joe Biden launches a criminal investigation into Elon Musk the moment that he announces this is going to happen.
00:30:14.000He says that, and this is amazing, the Department of Justice and the Security Exchange Commission partners together to say that they are going to launch a criminal investigation into Tesla and some of the open market practices.
00:32:08.000He is trying to bring this company back to what it could be and with it to have humanity be able to be more decent to one another, to be able to speak freely.
00:32:19.000And boy, they're doing everything they possibly can to stop it.