The billionaire’s messages began with a strict gag order and ended with damaging interference in reporting on the Gaza conflict.
A year ago this week, as the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was finalizing, Elon Musk tweeted “the bird is free. “Billionaires love nothing more than to present themselves as people’s liberators, yet this acquisition is compatible with the trend of their ever-expanding empire.
Musk has colonized spaces in the economy where public investment and regulation lagged behind. Its automaker, Tesla, is shaping the long-term of transportation; Meanwhile, SpaceX has replaced NASA in many tactics in the last frontier (so this year it has introduced 75 spacecraft).
Musk told himself and the world that he acquired Twitter (now rebranded X) to create “a virtual public square not unusual, where a wide diversity of ideals can be debated in a healthy way. “The subtext of this naïve homily was: what is it?What’s the point of being one of the richest men in the world if you can’t corner the market with a relaxed speech?
A year later, Musk, step by step, has reshaped his platform according to his own erratic image. The classic Twitter wisdom was, “Every day, on Twitter, there’s an important character. The purpose is never to exist. Musk reversed that message. The site’s set of rules ensures that your voice is the most memorable on base (you have 160. 5 million followers).
When he took office, the fear that he would remove the checks and balances put in place in reaction to the crisis of American democracy became apparent after the election of Donald Trump and populist governments around the world. Social media has admitted its guilt in taking credit for The Division.
On the occasion when Musk, in plain sight (and in front of a sycophantic audience, mesmerized by his billions), has doubled down on his fear, re-establishing a platform for conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers, personally magnifying attacks on what he likes. calling “legacy” (i. e. , verified) through the media and officials, implementing methods that magnify the set of corrosive attitudes pushed by Trump and the American right: the demonization of refugees, the imaginary “LGBT” timeline aimed at sexualizing children, the “war on awakening. “
Musk’s tweets feature more rocket launches than a North Korean propaganda film but, read together throughout this year, they also offer a glimpse into the increasingly tough politics of a guy whose baffling ambition is to own “the world’s thing. “
October 26, 2022 “Let it sink in!”
Musk arrived at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco with a sink in the bathroom. The technical brother’s “joke” that the technical brother’s “jokes” and much more were now allowed on Twitter “released”. The implications of this unserious new property were established a few days later, when Musk responded to a message from Hillary Clinton expressing outrage over the conspiracy theories surrounding the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Musk stepped in to magnify those theories, linking to an article about an infamous fake news site, the Santa Monica Observer. How we laugh.
November 20 “The others have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei’
Musk began unblocking Twitter accounts that had been deleted after the Jan. 6 insurrection, symbolically starting with that of former President Trump. During his first stop at Twitter’s headquarters, he insisted there was no fact to the rumors that he would lay off 75% of his 7,500 employees. . He is true to his word. It laid off about 80 percent, adding the vast majority of those monitoring the site for hate speech and conspiracy. It also dissolved the Trust and Safety Council, an advisory organization created in 2016 to address issues of child exploitation, suicide and self-reliance. -Damage to the platform. During that month’s elections in Brazil, in which disinformation fueled a new insurrection opposed to a democratic outcome, Musk himself allegedly made ad hoc calls related to violations of the guidelines.
December 12: “Either the virus of the awakened mind is defeated or nothing else matters”
Until about 2020, Musk had supported Democratic causes: He donated cash to the presidential campaigns of Obama and Hillary Clinton. This indistinct trust turns out to have been negated by Covid restrictions. “It’s fascist,” he said. This is not democratic. Give other people back their damn freedom. The rightward shift in his politics coincided with the fact that his eldest daughter, Vivian, had come out as a trans woman (she replaced his last call in 2022, stating in a court filing, “I no longer wish to be similar to my father biológico. de any way, in any way”). Musk blamed the breakdown of their appointments on “communist” indoctrination at a personal school he attended in Los Angeles. Among the leaked documents about Musk’s acquisition of Twitter were text messages from his ex. -wife, British actress Talulah Riley, who urged: “Please do anything to fight the awakening. I’ll do anything to help!”
January 15, 2023 “Instagram depresses other people and Twitter makes them angry. What’s better?”
In his legal biography, Walter Isaacson warned that Musk had misunderstood Twitter. “He considers it a generation enterprise,” Isaacson wrote, “when in fact it is an advertising medium based on feelings and human relationships. “This tweet pointed out that misconception. Musk, who identifies with Asperger’s syndrome, has a hard time understanding why the rest of humanity doesn’t share his philosophy of infinite possibilities. The vitriol he’s monetizing on Twitter seems to be a constant challenge to his $250 billion optimism. defenses, as the Wall Street Journal later reported, that Musk self-medicates with ketamine, the tranquilizer drug for horses, whose side effects come with dissociation and hallucinations. In reaction to the article, Musk tweeted that, based on what he had noticed with friends, “ketamine taken once in a while is a better choice” than prescription antidepressants. Another eight million people have noticed this approval.
February 3 “Starting today, Twitter will share the percentage of ad earnings with classified ad creators who appear in their responses as classified ads”
While Twitter was losing $4 million a day, Musk introduced a plan to increase ad revenue by encouraging users to subscribe and create content to access a small percentage of the profits. This Uber-like style of maximizing profits with a minimum of accountability has exposed the flaws of “citizen journalism. “In the absence of any workable formula of fact-checking or transparent accountability, the style inevitably leaned toward the kind of over-reviews and unbalanced content that guaranteed maximum good luck and likes.
March 28 “Doing My Own Thing for Humans”
Musk is driven by the feeling, fueled throughout his life playing video games, that only he can save the world from climate upgrade or AI catastrophe. In the midst of this confidence is his project to Mars and the dream of a “multi-planetary civilization. “A mantra that emerges from Isaacson’s e-book is, “If I don’t make decisions, we will die. “Thousands of unwavering Twitter fans love nothing more than to reinforce those bigoted fantasies. The tweet came here as a reaction to a post describing Musk as “one of the most selfish human beings. “Isaacson believes Musk tried to buy Twitter because he had been bullied as a child by his father and at school and “now he may just own the playground. “
April 9 “All data is, to some extent, propaganda. Let’s leave others to fend for themselves. “
Musk has undermined the authority of independent news outlets with the project and resources to provide accurate journalism (the BBC, NPR in the United States) by adding the line “state-sponsored media” to his messages, combining them with blatant propaganda from Russia Today and the Chinese government. Although this policy was revised after the protests, the draft seemed to give equal weight to all information. There is no explanation for how other people can simply “decide for themselves” what is true from this avalanche of competitive and unsourced information.
May “Soros reminds me of Magneto”
Comparing investor George Soros to Magneto, the supervillain from the X-Men comics, Musk referred to the anti-Semitic tropes of the far right. When investigative journalist Brian Krassenstein claimed that “Soros, a Holocaust survivor [like Magneto], is under constant attack because of his clever intentions,” Musk warned that Soros “hates humanity. “He revealed that Soros Fund Management had sold its entire stake in Tesla the day before.
June 20 ‘I’m going for a cage adjustment if it’s mdr’
When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg introduced a Twitter competitor called Threads, Musk challenged him to cage combat. Zuckerberg, who spends his free time practicing jiu-jitsu, agreed. Musk has so far not set a date for the fight, due to a back injury. The younger exchange was a reminder of the words Musk had whispered in his first wife Justine’s ear, according to his account, at their wedding reception: “I’m the Alpha in this relationship. If cage combat ever takes place, no one tunes in to the live stream.
July 23 “X is available”
Musk has had a superstitious obsession with the letter X since he invested in online banking X. com. The lyrics now appear in all of his projects and are part of his son’s ridiculous call with artist Grimes: X Æ A-12. Changing Twitter’s name (and getting rid of the bluebird that was among the most effective symbols in the company’s history) was, at best, an example of his boundless acceptance of his own instincts. The sinister Mark X was claimed as the first step toward its long-term goal of creating a “universal app” where the world can simply communicate, bank, and shop. If Musk had wanted to look like a real Bond villain, he hardly would have been more explicit.
August 25 “Next Level”
Trump signaled his return on Twitter by posting a photo of his detention in the Fulton County Jail for election interference. Musk retweeted this with the words “Next level. ” To give a glimpse of Twitter in the upcoming election year, he also heavily promoted an interview between fired Fox News provocateur Tucker Carlson and Trump, which was reportedly viewed 265 million times. Carlson interviewed a number of far-right leaders for X, adding Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Argentina’s populist candidate, Javier Milei. “You have to be prepared and fight the culture wars every day. . . Milei told him. ” A very engaging discussion that goes far beyond Argentina,” Musk tweeted.
Sept. 29: “I went to the Eagle Pass border crossing to see what was going on”
In anticipation of some other Trump campaign, Musk spent much of September in a cowboy hat, focusing his supporters’ considerations on the porous southern border and livestreaming reports on illegal immigration in Texas’ Eagle Pass. His forced calls with local sheriffs were marked by common themes. He asks on his screen, “Does this work?” News reports reported that he wanted to become a journalist for a local radio station when he grew up, but that he still had a long way to go.
October 8 “For real-time warfare, @WarMonitors and @sentdefender are good”
That tweet, which has since been deleted after Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities, shows how much Musk needed to be informed about existing events. The sites were temporarily shown to have spread fake news and @WarMonitors made anti-Semitic comments. In the days that followed, X was inundated with unverifiable content, which outgrew its new “community notes” feature (in which an organization of approved users uploads verified comments on untrusted tweets).
Musk was forced to post silly threats on the sites he had promoted: “Please use words that are as expressive as possible, or I will have to withdraw my advice to continue with your account. “
The war has put a spotlight on Europe’s new Digital Services Act, which has the force to hold social networks guilty if they don’t take steps to prevent the spread of disinformation. Unlike Facebook and Google, Musk has refused to inscribe X in the code. On Wednesday, Thierry Breton, the commissioner guilty of the act, touched Musk, it is not easy for him to turn to Europol to explain the infractions.
The businessman was also busy selling his new favorite T-shirt, in which he asked, “What would Orwell think?
He would no doubt have noticed Musk’s arrival.