Proponents of free speech and individual rights are celebrating the Twitter board’s acceptance of Elon Musk’s bid to take Twitter into the private sector. Should the deal close, there is a belief that the platform will be more open to diverse ideas and that rules and moderation will be enacted more consistently across the user base.

Is he really stepping up as a champion of free speech and digital rights? Or, given this futurist and serial entrepreneur’s scope of projects and interests that sometimes seem ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, is there something else going on entirely?

Musk has talked about the Optimus AI powered robot (also known as the Tesla Bot) in development. He said that he was, “surprised that people did not realize the magnitude of the Optimus robot program,” and that he believed that Optimus would be worth more than the Tesla car business.

Could there be a link between the data he can mine from Twitter interactions — how people share thoughts and respond to prompts — to further develop the Optimus or other AI?

Or perhaps there is an opportunity with another one of Musk’s endeavors, Neuralink, which is described as, “Developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” Whether it is customizing user interfaces, providing other relevant data or serving as a model for a brain-connected communication system, there may be synergy here as well.