Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is bracing for potential trouble when fellow billionaire Elon Musk completes his acquisition of Twitter, saying the free-speech advocate could make misinformation more prevalent by failing to properly police comment on the social media platform.
“He actually could make it worse,” Gates said of Musk on Wednesday in a Wall Street Journal interview. He added that the South African has a “mind-blowing” track record of building successful businesses at Tesla and SpaceX by being bolder than competitors and “really showing them up.”
“I kind of doubt that will happen this time, but we should have an open mind and never underestimate Elon,” Gates said. “What’s his goal? Where he talks about the openness, how does he feel about something that says vaccines kill people or that Bill Gates is tracking people? Is that one of the things he thinks should be spread? So it’s still… It’s not totally clear what he’s going to do.”
Gates argued that governments and social media companies failed to fully squash false commentary related to the Covid-19 pandemic. “When you don’t have the trusted leaders speaking out about vaccines, it’s pretty hard for the platforms to work against that,” he said. “So I think we have a leadership problem, and we have a platform problem.”