Why Elon Musk Contends Twitter Can Disrupt the Media Business

The billionaire entrepreneur has long held a dim view of news outlets, saying they are driven by getting “max clicks” for their articles and are beholden to advertisers. With the purchase of Twitter Inc., he is now casting them as rivals that are trying to protect their “oligopoly on information” as he seeks to position his social-media platform as a real-time news source fed by “citizen journalism.” 

“We want it to be…fundamentally the place you go to learn what’s going on and get the real story,” Mr. Musk said last month at a conference.

Twitter doesn’t look or act like traditional news outlets. Mr. Musk isn’t employing a newsroom full of reporters and editors to create articles. Instead, the seemingly aspiring media mogul relies upon users and their tweets, and a system of fact-checking that aims to ensure accuracy through a crowdsource-like approach. And, he says, it is all happening live. 

“If you contrast that to what’s happening in a newspaper: They have to learn the information, propose an article to their editor, get it approved, write the article, get it edited, figure out which day it is going to get published on,” Mr. Musk said last month. “The news is actually—the thing that happened—is being reported on…three, four days, sometimes a week late.”

Mr. Musk, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, has in the past touted what he sees as special insight that he has into how the newspaper industry works from his time almost 30 years ago with a startup he co-founded called Zip2. The company counted the New York Times, Hearst and Knight Ridder as both investors and clients for building out digital platforms aimed at trying to save some of their print ad businesses as the World Wide Web…