Money talks: the deep ties between Twitter and Saudi Arabia | X | The Guardian

Ali al-Ahmed didn’t think that Elon Musk was responsible for the decline and fall of Twitter. Musk was another face representing an old regime. And its sins began well before Musk bumbled into Twitter HQ, in October 2022, carrying a porcelain sink. (In an attempt at humour, Musk posted a video of himself arriving at the Twitter offices carrying a sink with the caption “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”) Ahmed was a Saudi journalist and analyst living in the Washington DC area. He was a founder of the Institute for Gulf Affairs (formerly the Saudi Institute), a Saudi-focused thinktank with an emphasis on human rights reporting, and was the kind of expert – passionate, principled, always glad to hop on the phone – that journalists loved having in their digital Rolodex. For Ahmed, who over the years had many family members imprisoned by the Saudi royal family, the pursuit of human rights was a solemn task. But he also had a kind of garrulousness – breaking into asides about his children or the talking gadget he’d invented to remind them to wash their hands – that reminded one of the deeper human stakes. “Twitter is no different
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