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Elon Musk Is Already Grinding Us Down

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But you don’t have to be the one to educate him.

By Charlie Warzel
Elon Musk laughing
(Getty)

There’s a line from the tech analyst Benedict Evans that has been making the rounds recently. Evans says that Elon Musk is “a bullshitter who delivers.” It’s a good line because it is (1) true enough, and (2) that contradiction is what makes lots of people pay attention to Elon’s every move. This, of course, means that people are also paying attention to a lot of bullshit. Evans’s axiom isn’t foolproof. Musk is a bullshitter who also sometimes simply bullshits. There are full websites dedicated to Musk’s broken promises. The man not only changes his mind quite frequently but is also prone to acting out—in part because it garners a lot of attention but also because, as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine put it recently, he “infuriatingly refuses to comply with the basic expectations of law and society” and he “is too impetuous and doesn’t really believe in rules or social norms.”

And so, Musk has been tweeting quite a bit about his new company ever since Twitter approved his offer on Monday. The tweets have mostly been, well, shitty. He’s twice called out Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, suggesting that Twitter’s content-moderation decisions have a left-wing bias. (The tweets led to a predictable pile on directed at Gadde and all kinds of racist language and threats; Musk feigned ignorance about the harassment when Twitter’s former CEO called him on it.) His vitriol has led to about a dozen Twitter employees being harassed. He’s been doing a lot of replying to right-wing/anti-SJW/MAGA or MAGA-adjacent Twitter pundits like Dave Rubin, Mike Cernovich, and Ben Shapiro, signaling agreement with their “the left is unhinged” speech critiques.

A theme of Musk’s recent tweets has been restoring Twitter to a kind of political neutrality, one he argues will anger the right and the left equally. So far he doesn’t seem to have signaled any ways that his tenure might frustrate the right flank. On Thursday, Musk tweeted a meme that suggests that the left has shifted dramatically further left since 2008 while the right has more or less stayed the same, leading centrists to identify more closely with the right. The tweets attacking Twitter staff sound, as Casey Newton remarked, “less like Twitter’s future leader and more like a special counsel appointed by House Republicans to identify Bias in The Algorithm.”

Musk’s tweets reflect bad leadership and shitty behavior. But they also reveal a shallow understanding of speech principles and a wrongheaded or at least obtuse analysis of our current politics. That meme chart? It is, as dozens have pointed out, wrong, and the reality is certainly far more complicated. Similarly facile is Musk’s notion that Twitter's free speech will comply with U.S. law, nothing more or less. In that case, Musk should be ready for Twitter to host virtual child-pornography videos (acceptable, via Supreme Court ruling) and all kinds of spam (which he purports to want to remove). Content moderation and speech laws: Combined, they’re a mess … and not often how they seem!

Watching this saga play out over Twitter, where each hastily composed Muskism is met with long, detailed debunks from people who mean well and know better, but who should probably also know better, has been frustrating. Researcher Renée DiResta captured the dynamic perfectly.

It is both heartening and disappointing to watch lawyers, political scientists, historians, and experts in fields like content moderation and First Amendment law battle Musk’s missives in the replies. The spectacle represents the best and worst of Twitter, the platform. On one hand, you have people publicly putting their various esoteric bits of deep knowledge to use; if you follow enough threads and have the ability to identify the people with trustworthy credentials, there’s a good chance you’ll learn quite a bit about moderation, speech law, and mergers and acquisitions, and even something about political-polarization trends. On the other hand, you have a very wealthy boob speculating and bloviating with extreme confidence and attracting enough attention to force others to parachute in and mop up his rhetorical messes.

I understand why people are putting a lot of time and energy into bringing their stats to the meme fight. Elon has a great deal of money and power and a large audience that hangs on his words. When he says something dumb or wrong, it makes sense to want to correct the record. For an academic or journalist or servant of the law, it very well might be the proper thing to do. But for a denizen of Twitter dot com, it is a mostly fruitless endeavor, and one that gives Musk what he wants—proof of outrage.

Note that since the purchase, Musk only seems to reply to those already in agreement with him—in this case, people who believe that Twitter’s speech is heavily biased toward the left, or that liberals on Twitter seem to be freaking out way too much over his potential acquisition. So far, I haven’t seen him respond to the tweets from journalists and academics asking him to clarify his points or offering evidence that contradicts his claims. Given that it’s clear he’s reading at least the verified portions of his mentions, it’s safe to assume he’s not very interested in engaging with those arguments. Maybe that’s because his mind is made up for now. And so we get the memes, which are reductive. But that’s the point! The meme—unlike the nuanced, information-laden tweetstorm rebuttals—is immediately legible to a wider audience, and also more engaging. By the time the claim is debunked, Musk and his fans have moved on, but the meme has created enough backlash that Musk can point to it and go, “See?! They’re going nuts … over a meme! They’ve lost it!”

We went through this with Donald Trump. (Though Musk knows how to use a computer, so unsurprisingly he engages in a more responsive, shitposty way.) Trump’s tweets not only enraged legions, prompting a backlash that Trump and MAGA influencers would then use to rile up their bases, they also created their own little (mis)information economy. Both Trump haters and lovers would race to be among the first people to reply to one of his tweets in the hopes that Twitter’s weighted reply algorithm would put them in the valuable engagement real estate directly below his original message. Scammers, pundits, trolls, and even media companies tried to surf the Trump wave of engagement for a little amplification, which meant, of course, directing attention at Trump himself. There is an enticing but very slim upside to engaging with an attentional black hole like Trump or Musk on Twitter. You probably won’t get what you want, but they will.

The argument I’m inclined to make is that one should not engage with Musk and his arguments on Twitter. Yes, he’s a smart businessman involved in some big, exciting companies, but he appears at present to have none of the competencies or expertise to run a social network. He’s shown repeatedly this week that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Yes, that’s concerning—but also, no, you don’t have to be the one to educate him. In fact, Musk is not yet the owner of Twitter and the deal could still fall through. So right now, Musk’s opinions on Twitter are just … one man’s (simplistic) opinions! So maybe there’s no good outcome from engaging and giving him the opposition that he craves and expects.

But! Musk’s tweets aren’t fired off in a vacuum, and his words have consequences. His tweets are leading to harassment of Twitter employees (mostly women and people of color). His engagement with a bunch of trolly right-wing accounts and his winking plans for a less moderated Twitter have been a signal for far-right influencers to return to the platform. People are genuinely worried Musk might roll back some of the rules that Twitter has put in place and that people might actually suffer on the platform as a result. Musk, after all, is a bullshitter who delivers. There is an understandable desire to shame Musk and to protest his behavior. It’s easy to feel powerless when the world’s richest man decides to buy one of the most consequential technology platforms for political speech on the internet. Few people want to sit back and shut up about it.

Like Trump, Musk puts his critics in a real bind. Broadly speaking, in an attention economy there’s no satisfying way to deal with people like them. There’s a circular thing where they command attention because they have some kind of power (fame, money, etc.) but, increasingly, their ability to command attention also grants them power (to influence/program the news cycle, amass cult-like followings, enhance their businesses). A few financial experts have recently suggested that a portion of Tesla’s financial success could be connected to his larger-than-life personality—which is most visible on Twitter. Here’s Lily Francus, the director of quant research at Moody’s Analytics, on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast this week describing this phenomenon:

Obviously you have individuals like Elon Musk who are very, very talented at staying in basically the news cycle. And I do think fundamentally that a significant fraction of Tesla’s value is due to the fact that Elon can command this attention continuously.

I can’t know Musk’s true reasons for buying Twitter but it does seem like the purchase only pushes him further into the political and cultural news cycles. As the potential steward of a major platform for speech, his every missive increases the amount and intensity of attention heaped on him. Is that good for driving up the value of his companies? I don’t know. He could royally mess up Twitter or alienate himself so far from progressives that he could do unforeseen damage. Or, his full ascendency into Person Who Everyone Has Strong Opinions About could be beneficial to his ego and his businesses.

I’m not naive enough to think that people will stop paying attention to Musk. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s the right thing to do. But our attention isn’t an abstract thing. I love what technology theorist L. M. Sacasas wrote this week: “The person who comes to Twitter seeking attention finds that their own capacity to attend to the world is wrecked in the process.”

Watching Musk form a juvenile and simplistic cultural and political worldview one tweet at a time seems to confirm this observation. It’s especially deflating with a guy like him, given all his resources and potential to attend to the world in a way that’s positive for society. But I also feel Sacasas’s line in myself as I watch my own impulse to engage with the richest man in the world online. I’m thinking today about what’s gained and lost in that process—a legion of well-meaning tweeters bringing stats to a meme fight. I feel my own capacity to attend to the world is somewhat wrecked these days. Maybe you feel it, too.

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.