For today, with his purchase of Twitter seemingly agreed-upon, Elon Musk is a hero to conservatives. But here’s the important thing: He was once a hero to liberals and progressives, he wasn’t always a hero to conservatives, he’s not anything resembling a consistent conservative, and the day will come sooner or later that we are forcibly reminded that he is not one of us. In the grand tradition of American entrepreneurs, Musk has always offered his share of self-promoting humbug.
It doesn’t matter.
The great thing about being a conservative — the kind who believes in free markets, a free civil society, and a world of private institutions beyond government — is that we can take our allies as they are. Not everybody has to be permanently sorted into Team Red and Team Blue. You do your thing, I do my thing, and when the two intersect, I buy your stuff. When they don’t, I don’t. We can cheer Musk when he is with us on some important things, and not feel obligated either to defend the stuff we disagree with, or renounce doing business with him. The virtues of social tolerance, economic voluntary exchange, and religious pluralism go together, and they allow us to work and live with people we agree with only some of the time. Musk’s public statements about Twitter suggest that he gets this: Twitter can succeed by making itself a place for all sorts of different communities, several of whom loathe each other. It just has to allow people to disagree without descending immediately to a Hobbesian war of all against all where the goal is not disagreement but deplatforming.
In many ways, this is the great issue of our time: the drive by authoritarians, progressives, and the illiberal Right to abolish the space in which people can speak freely, interact freely, cooperate some of the time, then go their separate ways. We do not need to pledge ourselves permanently to Elon Musk in order to recognize that his conquest of Twitter is likely to be a thing worth saluting.