Why would Will want SBF to buy Twitter, and think it worth billions? Apart from thinking it was a great business investment, a strong contender for the reason is ‘propaganda for our values’.
I don’t consider this a plausible motivation at all. Even assuming Will’s judgment wasn’t great here, he’s clearly smart enough to know that it would make an incredibly bad impression to run a site this large, associated with free speech (or lack thereof), and turn it into something that’s ideologically biased. You’d have to be incredibly naive to think that this has a shot at going well (and that’s almost the bigger issue than it being “not very high-integrity like”). In any case, I think it’s much more likely Will wanted to raise the world’s sanity waterline by improving public discourse norms. (Emrik made a comment with some example ideas.) (Edit: Just saw you already replied to Emrik and changed your mind somewhat, very cool!)
I don’t consider this a plausible motivation at all. Even assuming Will’s judgment wasn’t great here, he’s clearly smart enough to know that it would make an incredibly bad impression to run a site this large, associated with free speech (or lack thereof), and turn it into something that’s ideologically biased. You’d have to be incredibly naive to think that this has a shot at going well (and that’s almost the bigger issue than it being “not very high-integrity like”). In any case, I think it’s much more likely Will wanted to raise the world’s sanity waterline by improving public discourse norms. (Emrik made a comment with some example ideas.) (Edit: Just saw you already replied to Emrik and changed your mind somewhat, very cool!)