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Musk, SBF, and the Myth of Smug, Castle-Building Nerds

It’s a trap.

By Charlie Warzel
(Michael Gonzalez / Getty)

It’s been a wild few weeks, so I’m going to try to use the newsletter to corral some disparate thoughts into something approximating a larger narrative.

For the last month or so, my job has felt more surreal than usual. Yes, I’m referring to Elon Musk and Twitter and, to some degree, the complete implosion of the crypto exchange FTX. These things, especially when combined, add a lot of chaos and attention to the tech industry. But what feels so wild, from my vantage, is how quickly these stories have gone from bad to worse.

Musk has owned Twitter for about 20 days. In that time he has taken a platform that, while flawed, was functional, and done the following:

  • Cut staff so aggressively that people fear the site won’t be able to function properly, and so hastily that Twitter has had to ask some employees to come back.
  • Rolled out a pay-for-verification plan that may or may not lose Twitter money while also turning Twitter into a chaos market where people are paying $8 to impersonate politicians, brands, and public figures, and watch it go very viral.
  • Alienated advertisers that the company desperately needs with conspiratorial tweets and general erratic behavior.

This tweet basically sums it up:

I’ve gone into more depth on most of this stuff in other columns, but there’s a quality to following the whole thing minute-by-minute that feels like a fever dream. Musk is feuding on Twitter with current Twitter engineers and firing them, getting trolled by Doja Cat, holding strange all-hands meetings where he rambles about “gizmos” and talks about declaring bankruptcy. We’re finding out in real time that Twitter doesn’t have a communications department anymore and that the company could very well go under, while Musk continues to post excitedly about Twitter’s usage numbers and the need to get rid of bots (anecdotally, my DMs and the DMs of a number of writers I know are completely jammed with spam and bots in ways they haven’t been in years, if ever). It legitimately seems like he is quickly, systematically ruining Twitter out of sheer ego and incompetence.

What is mind-bending about Musk’s tenure is that it is extremely predictable while feeling almost inconceivably absurd. Musk is doing exactly what you’d expect a billionaire who thinks he’s the smartest man in the room to do if he bought a social network with almost zero understanding of how to run and moderate it (and zero curiosity to learn about the history).

Days before Musk bought Twitter, I spoke to numerous trust-and-safety officers and former social-media executives, who all suggested that Musk might take over, fire crucial staff, and watch as the social network’s infrastructure began to quietly (and not so quietly) falter. That is exactly what is happening. Those same people told me his ego and erratic management style would alienate employees and/or cause them to quit. That has happened.

Experts in content moderation suggested that Musk’s actual policies lacked any coherence and, if implemented, would have all kinds of unintended consequences. That has happened with verification. Almost every decision he makes is an unforced error made with extreme confidence in front of a growing audience of people who already know he has messed up, and is supported by a network of sycophants and blind followers who refuse to see or tell him that he’s messing up. The dynamic is … very Trumpy!

As with the former president, it can be hard at times for people to believe or accept that our systems are so broken that a guy who is clearly this inept can also be put in charge of something so important. A common pundit claim before Donald Trump got into the White House was that the gravity of the job and prestige of the office might humble or chasten him.

It didn’t. While in office, Trump supporters and even those who hated him invented all kinds of five-dimensional-chess theories about his grand plans or suggested he was orchestrating complex, nefarious plots against American institutions. Time and again, we learned there was never a grand plan or big ideas—just weapons-grade ego, incompetence, thin skin, and prejudice against those who don’t revere him.

The same seems true for Musk. Even people skeptical of Musk’s behavior pointed to his past companies as predictors of future success. He’s rich. He does smart-people stuff. The rockets land pointy-side up! When he bought Twitter, there was speculation from some that he might not know what he was doing, but that he would learn and that his baseline business acumen would reveal an adult trapped inside the Twitter troll.

And it continues today. “It’s incredible how many smart people are quietly whispering that Elon has to be destroying Twitter on purpose,” The Verge’s editor in chief, Nilay Patel, tweeted on Sunday. I’ve had similar interactions recently. Despite all the incredible, damning reporting coming out of Twitter and all of Musk’s very public mistakes, many people still refuse to believe—even if they detest him—that he is simply incompetent.

But it seems clear that’s what is going on here. Musk might be genuinely having a great time palling around with Catturd2 and using his $44 billion investment to piss people off, but that doesn’t mean this is part of some grand plan—in fact, it’s good evidence that he is flying by the seat of his pants. What is amazing about the current moment is that, despite how ridiculous it all feels, a fundamental tenet of reality and logic appears to be holding true: If you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t really care, you’ll run the thing you’re in charge of into the ground, and people will notice. And so the moment feels too dumb and too on the nose to be real and yet also very real—kind of like all of reality in 2022.

I don’t really know where any of this will lead, but one interesting possibility is that Musk gets increasingly reactionary and trollish in his politics and stewardship of Twitter. On Friday, Senator Ed Markey wrote a letter to Musk after a Washington Post reporter had successfully impersonated Markey’s Twitter account and asked the platform’s owner to “explain how this happened and how to prevent it from happening again.” On Sunday, Musk wrote back: “Perhaps it is because your real account sounds like a parody?” He then made a snarky remark about the senator’s profile picture, which features him wearing a mask.

Leaving the politics aside, from a basic customer-service standpoint this is generally an ill-advised way for the owner of a company to treat an elected official when that elected official wishes to know why your service has failed them. The reason it is ill-advised is because then the elected official could tweet something like what Senator Markey tweeted on Sunday: “One of your companies is under an FTC consent decree. Auto safety watchdog NHTSA is investigating another for killing people. And you’re spending your time picking fights online. Fix your companies. Or Congress will.”

Musk chose to wear his “own the libs” hat and get some cheap likes and retweets from his fans instead of wearing his “I own a bunch of big companies and it probably makes sense not to attract unnecessary government scrutiny” hat. That’s certainly a choice, and I have zero idea if he’s making it consciously. But it’s also a choice that could make sense for his ego. Because as Musk continues to bungle nearly every leadership and management decision at Twitter, he’s also (slowly) losing credibility among people who were generally agnostic about Musk and maybe used to give him the benefit of the doubt. (Those who were excited about Musk coming in and opening the free-speech floodgates are also growing disenchanted.)

It seems clear that Musk, like any dedicated social-media poster, thrives on validation, so it makes sense that, as he continues to dismantle his own mystique as an innovator, he might look for adoration elsewhere. And should Musk fully double down, it seems plausible he’ll find what he’s looking for. Recent history has shown that, for a specific audience, owning the libs frees a person from having to care about competency or outcome of their actions. Just anger the right people and you’re good, even if you’re terrible at your job. This won’t help Twitter’s financial situation, which seems bleak, but it’s … something!

On the subject of celebrated founders who are having bad weeks …

I’ve been thinking about a Twitter thread from Kathleen Breitman (a blockchain-company CEO herself) on FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. The thread is about how the tech industry has allowed an archetype of “‘smug nerds building castles in the sky’ to proliferate,” often resulting in big scams. Two pieces of the thread caught my eye:

The first description of Bankman-Fried tracks with my own experience. I don’t remember the first time I heard about him, but I do remember that, as soon as I heard his name, he was suddenly everywhere I looked. I confess to never really knowing that much about FTX or its business but having a very clear idea of who Bankman-Fried was, and what his philanthropy philosophy was, and where he lived, and which podcasts he was on, while also gleaning that he was probably playing League of Legends.

I will not claim to be above it, either. From afar he seemed interesting and enviable as an eccentric character in a bigger story, in the way a smart weirdo can be. I thought some of his bluntness in interviews was illuminating and that, if he kept talking, maybe he’d continue to show us how full of shit the people orbiting in the crypto space were (he was telling on himself, too, but “radical candor” is a good way to camouflage that).

What the FTX thread hits on, though, is the way that this cult of personality can not just outpace but totally obscure what the supposed genius is celebrated for.

It’s how Sam Bankman-Fried becomes SBF and how he ends up on the covers of all the Innovation Magazines and how we get writing like this sponsored-content profile (now deleted from the internet!) from the venture-capital fund Sequoia:

After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.
But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.

A gut feeling and a heart feeling! It’s too easy to skewer these paragraphs, given what we know now, but there’s something instructive to the writer’s gut/heart confession. Bankman-Fried, the archetype, appealed to people for all kinds of reasons. His narrative as a philanthropist, and a smart rationalist, and a stone-cold weirdo was something people wanted to buy into because, generally, people love weirdos who don’t conform to systems and then find clever ways to work around them and become wildly successful as a result.

As the thread notes, “The smug nerd appeals to people trying to understand what’s going on.” This point is key. The first time I heard of Bankman-Fried, I remarked that he felt like a character from a Michael Lewis book (it turns out that Michael Lewis thought so too and has been embedded with him for months, lol!). And a good Michael Lewis character is often somebody obscure who does something extraordinary because they see the world differently from everyone else. As characters, they aren’t just interesting; they’re stand-ins for some kind of paradigm shift, and Lewis’s gift is to translate their nerdery and genius to help people understand how a part of the world used to work and how it works now.

Bankman-Fried was a way that a lot of people could access and maybe obliquely understand what was going on in crypto. They may not have understood what FTX did, but they could grasp a nerd trying to leverage a system in order to do good in the world and advance progressive politics. In that sense, Bankman-Fried is easy to root for and exciting to cover. His origin story and narrative become more important than the particulars of what he may or may not be doing.

Since we don’t know everything about FTX’s meltdown (it doesn’t look great!), I won’t speculate on what was or wasn’t inside Bankman-Fried’s head. But the past few weeks have been yet another reminder that the smug-nerd-genius narrative may sell magazines, and it certainly raises venture funding, but the visionary founder is, first and foremost, a marketing product, not a reality. It’s a myth that perpetuates itself. Once branded a visionary, the founder can use the narrative to raise money and generate a formidable net worth, and then the financial success becomes its own résumé. But none of it is real.

At times throughout the Musk-Twitter saga, I’ve felt hacky for opining in an unequivocally negative way about his ownership. There is a long-simmering culture war between tech boosters and investors, on the one side, and the tech press on the other. My confidence that Musk would buy Twitter without doing his homework, find ways to mess it up, and alienate people falls directly into this narrative in a way that’s fairly predictable. Indeed, the tech vs. press culture war has come up a few times this month.

The writer Matt Yglesias suggested that part of the rationale of Musk’s Twitter purchase stemmed from an editorial decision from The New York Times to crack down on Big Tech and outlaw positive coverage of innovation, which then led to a lot of harsh (and occasionally, according to Yglesias, unjustified) coverage of Silicon Valley. The discussion even made its way to Bankman-Fried, who weighed in with a lighthearted joke.

Yglesias is right that the tech press changed (though I did work at The New York Times and never personally received any directive whatsoever that tech couldn’t or shouldn’t be covered positively). But part of that change came from years of frothy press-release-style coverage and blanket optimism that, to be honest, didn’t actually treat founders as important actors and didn’t really conceive of large technology companies as influential.

I remember this era well, because I was still new to the tech industry. The working assumption from much of the press was that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Google were still mostly quaint start-ups with no dress codes, Ping-Pong, and, yes, bean-bag chairs everywhere. It was honestly infantilizing coverage that spent years dwelling on Mark Zuckerberg wearing a hoodie. It also came, in part, from a lot of these companies maturing as they were being covered, and having the influence conferred by that maturation become immediately visible to the outside world—in our global culture and politics.

The truth is that adversarial tech coverage actually does respect technology companies and innovation in the way that its founders say they want to be respected. It tends to presuppose or at least seriously consider that the men building these companies and funding these tools might ultimately succeed and build powerful companies that will, in ways large and small, reshape the world and our culture. An aggressive interrogation of an industry reflects that the critic cares about its effects, particularly if the industry involves a technology that promises progress.

Adversarial journalism ideally questions and probes power. If it is trained on technology companies and their founders, it is because they either wield that power or have the potential to do so. It is, perhaps unintuitively, a form of respect for their influence and potential to disrupt. But that’s not what these founders want.

Yes, I do think there are cases where the techlash has ascribed malice where the real culprit was incompetence. Yes, I think that journalists like me probably don’t help by constantly snarkily tweeting about said incompetence. There are occasions where some bigger stories, like Cambridge Analytica, may have taught readers the wrong lessons (I don’t buy that psychographic profiling is voter mind control, for what it’s worth). But even if all tech coverage had been totally flawless, Silicon Valley would have rejected adversarial tech journalism because most of its players do not actually want the responsibility that comes with their potential power. They want only to embody the myth and reap the benefits. They want the narrative, which is focused on origins, ambitions, ethos, and marketing, and less on the externalities and outcomes.

Looking at Musk and Bankman-Fried, it would appear that the tech visionaries mostly get their way. For all the complaints of awful, negative coverage and biased reporting, people still want to cheer for and give money to the “‘smug nerds building castles in the sky.’” Though they vary wildly right now in magnitude, their wounds are self-inflicted—and, perhaps, the result of believing their own hype.

That’s because, almost always, the smug-nerd-genius narrative is a trap. It’s one that people fall into because they need to believe that somebody out there is so brilliant, they can see the future, or that they have some greater, more holistic understanding of the world (or that such an understanding is possible). It’s not unlike a conspiracy theory in that way. The smug-nerd-genius narrative helps take the complexity of the world and make it more manageable.

Putting your faith in a space billionaire or a crypto wunderkind isn’t just sad fanboydom; it is also a way for people to outsource their brain to somebody else who, they believe, can see what they can’t. That may sound nasty or cynical, but it’s an understandable impulse, and for some, it’s a hopeful belief that one can genuinely sort through the chaos and figure things out. But the smug nerd genius is exceedingly rare, and, even when they’re not outed as a fraud or a dilettante, they can be assholes or flawed like anyone else. There aren’t shortcuts for making sense of the world, and anyone who is selling themselves that way or buying into that narrative about them should read to us as a giant red flag.

One last thing: My friend Daniel and I are doing a fun little internet project we’re calling No Guilty Pleasures. We will talk to fun and interesting people about the weird things they love and collect their enthusiasm in one place. It’s a guilt-free zone and a free little thing we are making because it’s something we want to see on the internet.

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.