Buying Twitter

Someone named Valerie Wilson—former CIA officer, now author and activist—started a GoFundMe to buy Twitter and delete Trump’s account. The target was a billion dollars. They had raised about ten thousand.

The pitch is funny because it’s almost logical. Trump tweets dangerous stuff constantly—calls leaders fat, insults foreign powers, seems determined to speed-run us toward catastrophe just because he can’t quit the internet. Twitter won’t moderate him because he generates engagement and engagement is revenue, and apparently no amount of geopolitical instability beats a dip in ad money.

So the fantasy catches anyway. Acquire the platform, delete his account, problem solved. You can see why Valerie thought it was worth trying. Maybe she figured nothing else was working.

What stuck with me was the impossibility of the fix even if it somehow succeeded. The money arrives, Twitter gets bought, his account disappears. He moves platforms. Same problem, different website. Lower moderation, more chaos. The disease isn’t Twitter—it’s that we built a system where the most destabilizing voices are exactly the ones generating the most revenue to protect. Crowdfunding can’t fix something that structural.