Jeff Bezos holds the aviation glasses that belonged to Amelia Earhart as he speaks throughout a press convention about his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard into house on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Amazon’s billionaire co-founder Jeff Bezos has weighed in on Elon Musk’s deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion.
Bezos shared a tweet late Monday suggesting that China may acquire affect over Twitter as soon as the acquisition completes.
“Did the Chinese authorities simply acquire a little bit of leverage over the city sq.?” Bezos wrote, hinting at Musk’s enterprise ties to China. The Tesla CEO established a manufacturing facility in Shanghai in 2018 and the corporate depends closely on Chinese corporations to produce the supplies that go into its batteries.
Twitter’s board agreed Monday to an acquisition of the corporate by Musk. Twitter can be taken personal at $54.20 per share in a deal valuing the agency at roughly $44 billion.
Twitter is banned in China. Beijing’s so-called “Great Firewall” prohibits entry to a variety of Western social media websites, together with Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
“My personal reply to this query might be not,” Bezos added. “The extra possible end result on this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, moderately than censorship at Twitter.”
“But we’ll see. Musk is extraordinarily good at navigating this sort of complexity,” he added.
Despite the caveat, Bezos’ feedback are the most recent in a long-running feud between the 2 billionaires.
The pair have often sparred over their respective house ambitions through the years. Musk is CEO of SpaceX, whereas Bezos runs his personal house enterprise, Blue Origin.
While Musk has promised to enhance Twitter’s position as a “digital city sq.” wherein customers can converse and debate freely, the takeover has sparked concern from some politicians and campaigners who fear it will give the world’s richest man an excessive amount of management over on-line discourse.
Billionaires proudly owning media firms shouldn’t be a new phenomenon, nonetheless. Bezos himself owns The Washington Post, whereas Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff purchased Time Magazine in 2018. But Twitter is exclusive in that it’s a platform the place tens of millions of individuals work together in addition to share content material — and as such is beneath shut scrutiny from regulators.