Twitter's Most Anti-Musk Shareholder is Unsurprisingly Woke
Twitter finally accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to buy the social media giant on Monday. Musk faced a long battle, fighting “poison pills” and competing with other organizations like Vanguard Group. But one of the most interesting revelations was Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s strong opposition to the deal.
The saga with Talal, one of Twitter’s largest shareholders, points to a larger problem of foreign control of our most influential institutions.
Talal was careful to articulate why refusing to sell the company at Musk’s generous price still fulfills the board’s fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders. He claimed that the company had such enormous growth potential that Musk’s markup was still insufficient. This justification was questionable though, considering repeatedly poor earnings reports from Twitter in recent quarters. It’s more likely that Talal had political motivations for holding on to his share.
A member of the Saudi royal family and cousin of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Talal grew one of the largest fortunes in the world through his business Kingdom Holding Company. Through Kingdom, Talal built an investment portfolio that includes major shares in companies such as Citigroup and Twitter. In 2017, Talal had a falling out with the current Saudi leadership when he was arrested during an “anti-corruption” purge. Talal paid his way out of the situation, but details of the charges remain unknown.
But why would a Saudi prince be so interested in keeping Twitter out of Elon Musk’s hands? That’s because Musk represents everything that the Saudi government does not.
Musk has called for more free speech and transparency into Twitter’s algorithmic practices. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, benefited from censorship at the cost of Western values. To see this in action, we only need to look to the Talal-backed centers at American and European universities.
In the years after 9/11, Talal established six Islamic centers around the world to spread positive perceptions of the religion. Harvard and Georgetown University, who happily accepted $20 million apiece, housed two of those centers. Since then, the centers have consistently promoted narratives about Islamophobia that we’ve come to expect from American academics.
Georgetown’s Alwleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding is the typical example of far-left group-think. The Center’s Bridge Initiative, for instance, portrays public figures with whom they disagree with, such as talk show host Tucker Carlson and congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as Islamophobic. The Center also hosts cultural competency workshops for nurses, which has become another tool to promote Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) in education. And they even find ways to censor speech, most often by promoting language restriction. For example, a curriculum meant for high school teachers suggests the replacement of “disparaging” terms like Islamic “fundamentalists” with more friendly terms like “revivalists” to “move beyond caricatures of Muslim fundamentalists as dangerous ‘others.’”
At the University of Cambridge in England, Talal’s involvement directly threatens academic freedom. Talal can appoint up to three members on a committee that oversees the Centre of Islamic Studies’ activities. This gives Talal an unusual degree of oversight over the center. And if Cambridge wants to alter these regulations, they can only do so after they receive explicit permission from Talal. Some academics expressed concerns over these arrangements, but the university brushed them aside to onboard Talal’s lucrative deal. Soon thereafter, it became clear to academics that the center was more focused on public outreach and cultural influence than academic inquiry.
The spread of woke ideologies and DEI narratives required some amount of language restriction, omission of facts, and heavy oversight to execute. Talal and the Saudi government benefit from these practices to shape public perceptions of their country. Much like what has happened at our universities, the Saudi government benefits from Twitter’s commitment to promote one-sided progressive values while squashing dissenting views.
Of course, Talal’s close ties to Twitter made it easier for the site to “overlook” disingenuous practices by the Saudi government.
Saudi Arabia has deployed bots to protect the country from sensitive topics, such as their poor record on women’s rights and ongoing siege of Yemen. But it often requires the bots to participate in online conversations using disingenuous engagement tactics, which hurts the user experience. In 2019, the DOJ also charged multiple Twitter staffers for spying on Saudi Arabian dissidents, with court papers listing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as part of the plot. It appears that the Saudi government greatly benefited from its close ties with Twitter, through Talal. But Musk’s takeover presents a threat to these censorious practices that simply promote the image and interests of a foreign country.
Twitter’s fate is now in Musk’s hands. But Americans should see this entire situation as a wake-up call to the degree of foreign influence in our most powerful institutions. Twitter has become the de facto public square for political discourse, and universities are still the most important institutions for generating new ideas. The fact that both of these crucial power centers have been partially accountable to foreign actors should concern Americans.
Foreign investors and their governments do not have Americans’ best interests at heart. They are deeply interested in exerting influence over Western culture and politics. Musk’s takeover of Twitter hopefully reverses course on a system that has been too eager to sell off our institutions to foreign investors for a quick buck.
Neetu Arnold is a senior research associate at the National Association of Scholars. Follow her on Twitter @neetu_arnold.
