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I don't really think you can square the vision of Elon as particularly ideological (for free speech, technolibertarianism or whatever else) with a lot of the revealed policy decisions, and this includes actions and positions before the Twitter acquisition. At the end of the day, he's just not a particularly ideologically committed person. He'd like to be seen as such, and post-rationalises a lot of his decisions in that frame, but the underlying interests just seem like the usual, not-very-deep collection of personal and material.
This isn't a case of Elon setting a new policy, and then the policy being enforced. Elon's hitting the button himself after some personal slight or bad experience and then the policy is hastily written after the fact. See elonjet or the various journos getting knocked off (even taking spaces itself down). Before this, look at the breaking point for him on Covid policies (e.g. shutting down his factories), or with Trump's council of advisors, or his unwillingness to extend his supposed free speech principles to criticisms of China. Hell, he's now picking up the crusade against the independence of the federal reserve -- which he'll wrap in some principle or another but really comes down to the dire serviceability of the Twitter debt.
The main reason he initially bought Twitter wasn't altruistic, it was because the company was stagnant and overstaffed and had leadership that was largely content with that. For various reasons, Elon's succeeded in wringing significantly more productivity per dollar out of expensive tech talent in other domains. Now it turns out he's massively overpaid and is looking to offload shares at the original purchase price to various MENA autocrats.
I think it was a giant joke and then he realized he would actually be forced to buy it.
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