Surveilled 95: Elon Musk's radicalisation playground
Elon Musk's radicalisation playground
Conger, K., & Mac, R. (2024). Character limit: how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. Penguin Press.
American journalists practically have a trademark on the kind of book that Character Limit is: deeply researched, with dozens of sources, and written like a thriller. A classic in this genre is Barbarians at the Gate, and recent examples abound, for example Super Pumped about Uber, or Bad Blood about Theranos. For better or for worse, these tomes tend to start from the same objective viewpoint that the newspapers espouse, balancing “both sides”. Sometimes though, they also end up painting too grandiose a picture of what are essentially humdrum events.
By and large, that is certainly not the case here. In Character Limit, New York Times journalists Kate Conway and Ryan Mac dive into one of the more consequential sagas in Silicon Valley these past few years, Elon Musk’s on-again off-again takeover of Twitter. Along the way, it paints a vivid picture not only of the current occupant of the “tech bro” throne, but also of the accompanying royal court of hangers-on. In this case it is mostly made up of members of the so-called “PayPal mafia.”
They all became successful to various degrees, financially at least, and as often follows, they ended up terminally mistaking their luck for superior skill. And to make matters worse, they of course assume that their skills apply not only to their domain of activity, but really to every domain of human endeavour. The delusion runs so deep that they have outright extrapolated it to eugenics. Their superior skill must be evidence of superior genes, so they would be doing humanity a favour by fathering—the Paypal mafia are all men—as many children as possible. It pains me to emphasise that this is not caricature: Musk has repeatedly spoken about this in public.
This is but one example of how Musk’s statements and behaviour have become increasingly bizarre and even deranged over the last few years. His adulation has significantly decreased as a result, and Character Limit is unlikely to reverse this trend: the authors pay lip service to the “both sides” convention and strip Musk of a good bit more veneer.
Consider the striking banality of the text messages that Musk exchanges with his court, replete with spelling mistakes and (un)funny memes. Comparing their group chats to your average “the lads” WhatsApp group would be insulting to the latter. Astute business insights were seemingly rather less likely to emerge in these conversations.
COVID seems to have radicalised Musk, removing any internal moderation on his pre-existing tenets of faith against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, unions, the government and generally anything he deems “woke”. Plainly, Musk seems convinced that his statements are thought-provoking truth bombs that are evidence of his galactic intellect. In reality, they are largely a basic blend of alt-right tropes, mixing anarcho-capitalist ideas with science denialism and conspiracy theories.
Worse, Musk also seems to share the far right’s confusion on the meaning of “free speech”. To him, it appears to mean that he should be free to say the most outrageous things without consequence, whereas his critics of course should be insulted, mocked and harassed, if not outright denied a platform. Indeed, this approach frequently led him to show the limits of his character, witness his abject treatment of his trans daughter. And increasingly, he was falling afoul of Twitter’s content moderation, despite the company’s relative laissez-faire attitude and glacial pace of enforcement.
Restoring free speech to the platform thus became Musk’s primary motivation for taking over Twitter. He often spoke of his intent to apply “free speech absolutism” on the platform, effectively doing away with most of its content moderation. Unfortunately, that intent betrays a hopelessly naive view. The challenges of running a large social media platform are not technical, they revolve around content moderation.
Twitter took its self-described role as the world’s town square seriously, and developed a content-moderation organisation to match. It worked across all of Twitter’s geographies and therefore languages. They often had to make very sensitive calls, and mostly outside of the US, where speaking the local language and understanding the context was of paramount importance.
Musk and his one-time (and future?) ally Trump were often the source of many of these calls of course, meaning that whatever Twitter decided, they would get criticised for it. But by and large, despite all the criticism to the contrary from the right and the left, the company did this relatively well.
Inevitably lacking Twitter’s fine-grained understanding of content moderation, and the intellectual humility to realise that, Musk saw a juicy target for cost savings. His savage cuts to the organisation hit hard, and ended up unleashing chaos on the platform. Today, indications are that Twitter has morphed into an echo chamber, first for Musk, and then his acolytes on the far right, much like Trump’s own Truth Social. The idea of a global town square is long gone.
The savage cuts and their cruel implementation also seem to betray an element of vengefulness in his approach to the takeover. The whole saga started as a bad joke with a marijuana reference, and in the months that followed Musk certainly did not look like he was serious about buying Twitter at the price he proposed, however comically. But of course, institutions like the SEC and the courts forced him to.
The hallmark of a good investigative reporting book is not only what it can tell us about the past, but also how it informs the present. Here the parallels with Musk’s behaviour at the infamous Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) are all too obvious. Character Limit was written before Trump’s accession to the presidency earlier this year, so it does not directly address it, but the sense of deja-vu is uncanny. Musk’s vengefulness for government institutions was on full display at DOGE, perhaps triggered by his run-ins with the SEC and the courts. His naive “first principles” approach that dismisses expert advice has caused immediate chaos, cost thousands of lives globally, and inflicted as yet unmeasurable harm to the foundations of American democracy.
Of course, someone as self-centred and mercurial as Musk is not particularly known for his ability to maintain relationships, and neither is his then-employer Trump, so it’s not surprising that their “bromance” is on the rocks. As a consequence, his impact at DOGE seems to have been short-lived and limited. Twitter on the other hand was absolutely unable to resist his onslaught, and for all intents and purposes no longer exists. Let’s hope that the democratic institutions of the US prove to be stronger.