Gab Responds: Elon Buys Twitter, Now What?

Many people have been asking me what I think about Elon Musk purchasing Twitter for $44 billion dollars. In this letter I’m going to tell you what this means for Gab and provide my analysis of the situation as someone who has been trailblazing free speech infrastructure on the internet for nearly six years.

Tonight I am going to sleep as Peter did in Acts chapter 12 the night before his execution. For those of you who don’t know the story, I probably sound crazy, but if you read your Bible you’ll see that in Acts 12 Peter is miraculously freed from jail where an angel found him sleeping like a baby.

On the surface Acts 12 looks like the story of Peter’s miraculous escape from prison. If you look a little deeper you’ll see that it is actually about Peter’s miraculous transformation from the man who denied Jesus three times to a man with enough faith to sleep like a baby the night before his scheduled execution.

Peter was sleeping so peacefully and deeply while being chained to the arms of two guards in jail that when an angel appeared he thought he was dreaming or having a vision in the fog of waking up from a deep sleep.

Then Peter came to himself and said, “Now I know without a doubt that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from Herod’s clutches and from everything the Jewish people were hoping would happen.”

Acts 12:11

This is the faith that I have in this moment.

A moment where our enemies are saying “Gab is surely dead now” for the 1000th time in six years.

It’s the same faith I had when Gab was reduced to a pile of ash in the fall of 2018 and we lost everything. We were banned from hosting providers, payment processors, and my CTO quit all within roughly 72 hours. The website was offline for six days, but on day seven the site was resurrected by the grace of God and by the incredible determination of one brave engineer who didn’t sleep for a week.

It is from that pile of ash that I watched God grow Gab into the single most resilient alternative to Big Tech with a community of tens of millions of people that it is today.

As Christians, we are blessed to witness the Resurrection Power of Jesus Christ in our lives. We watch in awe as He takes things that are dead and raises them back to life.

Jesus Christ turns tragedy into testimony.

Gab is my testimony.

Unlike Mr. Musk I don’t answer to anyone outside of God almighty, especially not moneychangers.

Just a few days ago Morgan Stanley was praising Elon’s Boring Company to CNBC. A few weeks before that they were praising his other company Tesla. Morgan Stanley owns 3.7 million Tesla shares equal to about $3.9 billion in value so it should come as no surprise to learn that they are backing Elon’s $44 billion Twitter takeover and praising every company Elon runs.

Many people wrongfully believe that Elon pulled $44 billion out of his bank account and bought Twitter, but that’s not how any of this works. Elon’s moneychanger friends financed over $20 billion of the deal. The moneychangers don’t just throw around $20 billion for no reason.

So who really bought Twitter and who will really be in control? God only knows.

What I know for certain is that I fully control Gab as its supermajority shareholder and sole Board member.

You can learn more about who I am here.

Elon can have Twitter.

People falsely assume that Gab is a “Twitter knockoff,” but this hasn’t been the case for several years. Functionally Gab is more like Facebook. We have Gab Groups, Gab Marketplace, Gab News, Gab TV, GabPay, and much more on the way. We aren’t and haven’t been competing with Twitter for years. Facebook users are our core target market.

We quickly realized back in 2019 that the vast majority of people in the United States are simply not on Twitter. The first issue is that over half of Twitter’s “users” are bots. The other half are young inner-city Democrats and journalists, but let’s be honest these people are basically robots too.

The bottom line is these aren’t our people. This isn’t our target market. The majority of people who remain on Twitter today will never use Gab because they will never survive in an environment with true free speech. There is finite number of conservative Twitter users who will make the switch, but tens of millions of Christian Facebook users who want off of Zuckerberg’s demonic plantation.

If anyone is doomed by Elon Musk buying Twitter it’s Parler, Gettr, and Truth Social.

The entire value proposition of Parler, Gettr, and Truth Social was being “not Twitter.” None of them even offer a free speech Terms of Service. In Parler’s case, they bent the knee to Apple and started censoring to get back on the App Store. In Gettr’s case, they ruined their reputation on day one by censoring right-wing political dissidents. Truth Social is a disaster that uses Silicon Valley AI to censor. Its main attraction–President Donald Trump–doesn’t even use his own platform.

I predict that Elon Musk buying Twitter will force the left to balkanize into niche platforms of shared values like the right has. We will see the Gab, Parler, and Gettr of the left pop up. I’ve been talking about the fragmentation and decentralization of social media into smaller niche communities for several years now and things are about to accelerate in this area. That’s a good thing. It means Silicon Valley is losing power and fast.

Bloomberg is reporting that Twitter’s source code has now been locked down to make it harder for current employees to make unauthorized changes to the platform. This tells us that Twitter’s Board recognizes the total and complete internal meltdown that is happening right now.

We’ve seen rogue employees and contractors at Twitter before. Remember the time a random contractor, not even an employee, deactivated the account of the President of the United States? Or how about the former Twitter employees who ended up being spies for Saudi Arabia?

Elon now has to deal with 7,500 far-left Twitter employees and I sincerely wish him all the best in absolutely clearing house and starting from scratch by firing every last one of the existing employees. Needless to say, this won’t be an easy task, nor will be upending Twitter’s policies and technology.

Aside from the internal war and struggle that Elon is about to endure at Twitter he will also face a variety of external attacks from the media, the government, the ADL, and Big Tech giants like Apple and Google who control Twitter’s distribution destiny on the app stores.

Apple’s market cap is 2.7 trillion dollars. Don’t think for one second they won’t ban a $44 billion dollar app like Twitter from their app stores. Fortnite is owned by a $28 billion dollar video game giant and was the most popular video game in the world at the time, but that didn’t stop Apple from banning their app from the App Store without blinking. It won’t stop them from banning Twitter either.

The media will give Elon the Trump treatment and call him a “racist bigot nazi white supremacist hater.” They will go after all of his other businesses. There will be leaks from Twitter employees to the press constantly. The ADL and SPLC will create bogus “studies” to show how “toxic” and “harmful” Twitter is and then feed that to the press.

Today the Biden administration said they would support “reforming Section 230, enacting anti-trust reforms,” and “requiring more transparency” on social media to combat COVID-19 “misinformation.” So now Elon will have to deal with regulators, lawmakers, and the Executive branch.

Then there is the fact that Twitter is totally and completely dependent on third-party infrastructure. They will be attacked at every level of the tech stack from DNS, to hosting providers, app stores, email services, and more. Some of the top investors in Silicon Valley are already predicting this, as if to say they already have these wheels in motion! Gab overcame and rebuilt from absolutely nothing through all of these hurdles. Will Twitter be able to do so at their scale and at what cost?

When Twitter gets banned from half a dozen banks, Visa, app stores, hosting providers, email services, and more they can get on our level with free speech.

Almost two weeks ago in my offer letter to Elon, I said this: “Twitter operates in countries where mass censorship is required by law. They have offices in these countries. They have no choice but to comply with the censorship demands of those countries or risk being shut down, fines, etc.”

Today the Financial Times is reporting that “Brussels has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must comply with the EU’s new digital rules under his ownership, or risk hefty fines or even a ban, setting the stage for a global regulatory battle over the future of the social media platform.”

These are things we have dealt with for years here at Gab. Last summer the German government demanded we censor content on Gab. Will Elon respond as Gab did?

Regardless of what Elon does with Twitter I will be waking up tomorrow and doing the same thing I have been doing for the past six years of my life: building Gab. As long as I’m alive I’ll be building parallel Christian systems and internet infrastructure to defend the Gospel, my family, and our God-given right to speak freely. I’ll also be giving all the glory to God while doing so.

Gab’s vision and mission are simple: we are building a Parallel Economy to defend Christian values, free speech, free thought, and the free flow of information online.

We hope you’ll join us.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus Christ is King of Kings