Live by the Mob, Die by the Mob

The dark comedy of Elon Musk’s forays into populism and Twitter.

What DeepAI spit out when I typed in “Elon Musk 18th century portrait.”

Happy Festivus!

2022 has been a busy year for Elon Musk — and a costly one. After spending tens of billions of dollars buying Twitter, and the sell-off of Tesla stock that soon followed, Musk is no longer the world’s richest person. If his net worth took a hit, it was nothing next to his reputation. The hard left has long reviled Musk for the crime of being a billionaire and the unforgivable sin of being seen doing more to advance left-aligned causes than they ever could, but the antipathy had been confined there. Now, after months of shitposting, petty retaliations, and erratic management, he is regarded by large swaths of society as a Trump-like figure. The biggest casualty of all is the missed opportunity to improve Twitter, a prospect that now seems as distant as any Mars colony. Perhaps Musk’s most self-sabotaging blunder was leaning into populism. His constant appeals to the “people” culminated in a December poll in which he asked users whether he should step down as head of Twitter, vowing to honor the results. Over 10 million people (57.5 percent of respondents), voted “yes.” When you live by the mob, you also die by the mob.

The very process of Musk’s Twitter acquisition was an insane game of ping-pong. In April 2022, Musk purchased nearly $3 billion of Twitter stock, over nine percent of the company, looking to gain some influence over the platform. Days later, figuring “In for a penny, in for $44 billion”, he placed a bid to buy Twitter outright. The board resisted Musk, executing some internal maneuvers to block him, but to no avail. Fast forward a few months, and Musk was the one trying to pull out, citing that Twitter was not upfront about the number of bot accounts, though perhaps also lamenting the price tag. In a bizarre twist, Twitter then sued Musk to force him to uphold his end of the deal, which he complied with, and in October, the sale was finally done. The impulsive nature of the affair foreshadowed what was to come.

Musk’s stated motivations for acquiring Twitter were purportedly humanitarian, and more than a little grandiose. He wanted to “save civilization” by fixing the platform most favored by the movers and shakers, and to establish Twitter as a more moderate, civil, and open public forum where all could be heard. His actions, however, tell another story. Over this past year, Musk seems to have devolved as a person, growing more juvenile and capricious by the month. The tech visionary of the 2000’s and 2010’s appears to be gone, replaced by his inner sixth grader. Rather than establishing a set of guiding principles to heal the blue bird and then putting a competent team in place to carry them out, Musk has merged Twitter with his own id. 

After reportedly firing somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the company’s workforce, Musk has taken to sleeping in his office and running Twitter by fiat, implementing whatever synaptic exhaust fumes next form in his head, however ill thought-out the logistics might be. That is, when he’s not putting major decisions to the (unscientific) vote with Twitter polls consisting mostly of his own followers. Musk has allowed back in many of the previously banned accounts, while also personally seeing to the suspensions of others, on highly dubious grounds, who have harshly criticized him. This clown show is set against the steady backdrop of Musk’s personal tweeting habits, where he relentlessly trolls and antagonizes half the user base with shitpost memes and edgelord jokes, sending them out to his 120+ million followers and into virality. His rabid fanboys can concoct all the justifications they want for the hidden genius behind these gambits, but needless to say, this is not how any reasonable person would go about making Twitter a more moderate, fair, and open platform.

The paradox of Musk’s digital governing philosophy, if it can even be called that, is the paradox we see in populism everywhere. Populism makes constant reference to “the people”, and professes to represent their will, but offers only authoritarianism. So too, Musk spins his new regime as being a crusade to democratize Twitter, when in reality, power and authority has never been more concentrated in fewer hands — namely, his own. Seeing Musk roundly humiliated by one of his own farcical polls is not only fitting, but entirely predictable, given history. Trying to use the rabble as a justification or weapon to advance your own agenda is a double-edged sword, and Musk’s reputation has died by it.

All of that said, has the day-to-day Twitter experience actually changed? Not noticeably, except for the fact that Elon Musk is all anyone ever talks about now. The overreactions have been incredible to observe. Over the course of 2022, Elon Musk has supplanted Donald Trump as the left half of society’s foremost bogeyman. Melodramatically ranting and raving about Musk, even calling for his arrest, and showing how much snark you can zing him with is now a social currency in the MSNBC-o-sphere. Otherwise serious people have become obsessed with hate-following Musk’s every move and compulsively amplifying anything disparaging to him. Weekly predictions of Twitter’s imminent shutdown abound across the platform, and when it fails to transpire, like every doomsday cult, the timeline gets reset with nary a glimmer of self-consciousness.

Musk has armed his detractors with ample fodder for reasonable criticism, but the tenor of the hysteria goes well beyond that. A certain social caste is feeling their grip loosen over part of the culture. Journalists and writers are mostly self-absorbed, navel-gazing blowhards, and they’re the loudest core of Twitter's user base. They have long seen Twitter as their personal playground to curate the national conversation to suit their own sensibilities. Musk, for all of his flaws, is taking that away from them, and they’re throwing round-the-clock tantrums about it. That Twitter is dictated by unprincipled whims and personal taste concerns them not one iota. That it’s no longer their whims that shape the conversation is what has them in permanent meltdown mode. Even as I claw my way into their ranks, I cannot help but feel a kind of karmic joy at their dismay.

In May, I wrote largely in favor of Musk’s then-bid to purchase Twitter. It seems fairly obvious now that things have not turned out as I had hoped, though I stand by my analysis. Whether or not Musk would improve Twitter was always a roll of the dice, but the requisite first step to fundamentally addressing its problems was taking the company private. All of the most toxic facets of social media — the bad incentives, the algorithmic biases, and the gaming of people’s attention and emotions — tie directly into user engagement and the profit motive. To fix what most ails Twitter, one must be willing to take a financial loss, something no publicly traded company can abide. The problem is that the extraordinarily short list of people with the wealth sufficient to buy a major social media platform outright and then take it private are mostly eccentric, egomaniacal weirdos.

Taking the broader view, however, what’s happening with Twitter is more of a win-win situation than it might at first seem. If, in the now seemingly unlikely event that Elon Musk gets his act together and improves Twitter (or installs someone who does), that’s a win. If Musk fails, and Twitter declines in both use and relevance, that too is a win. Though it’s been good to me personally, Twitter has enabled and supercharged many of our worst impulses and mental habits, and I’m willing to take one for the team here (am I not merciful?). The added bonus is watching the internet’s smarmiest and most annoying people driven to paroxysms of comical rage at having their favorite toy taken away by an even bigger baby. At the end of the day, Twitter is a gravely ill patient. Healing it would be ideal. Short of that, euthanizing it seems most humane. Between the two, Elon Musk has a shot at doing something useful here, however much of a shitshow it is along the way.

See also: “How To Improve Social Media”

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