Elon Musk

The [SolarCity] trial’s most illuminating moments were the ones in which the central questions that have long haunted Musk’s career were made explicit. Is he a visionary or a huckster? A marketing genius or a narcissistic troll? Elon Reeve "Ted Faro" "Chief Twit" "Space Karen" "The Boer" Musk (born 1971) is a high-profile businessman and conspiracy theorist best known for his S3XY electric vehicles and his "plans" to colonise Mars,  and was at one time the  wealthiest person in the world, beating out Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at the beginning of 2021 and being beaten by Bernard Arnault in December 2022. By 2023, Musk had been recognized by the Guinness World Record for "largest loss of personal fortune in history" (US$182 billion loss). He is also the embodiment of the hi-tech messiah complex of the 21st century with a detailed history of terrible Twitter shit-posting.

Musk is notable for massively promoting several firms that have pushed cutting-edge innovation forward in the fields of green technology, cars in space, artificial intelligence, hyperloop, and space travel, and several charities including the Tesla Museum. He is considered by some as one of the world's most influential people and a major player in alternative-energy technology and future spaceflight. Musk is, however, also notable for defending questionable labour and anti-union practices at his manufacturing companies and having a strange view of modern capitalism. In the last couple of years, Musk has found endless controversy (and legal problems) with bizarre and even despicable tweets ranging from COVID-19 misinformation and anti-lockdown stubbornness, market-destabilizing comments and libeling a diver as a pedophile. And denying that a Neo-nazi was in fact, a neo nazi.

Youth
Musk was born wealthy, as are so many billionaires. His father co-owned an emerald mine in Zambia, and Musk lived a lavish lifestyle in his youth because of this. To avoid a mandatory stint in the South African military, which would have required him to uphold the apartheid regime that he has at times claimed that he despised and other times not mentioned it as a rationale for leaving South Africa. He left South Africa to attend college in Canada and the United States; while certainly a display of privilege, it was also a very real move to avoid upholding white supremacy at the point of a gun but not at the point of a krugerrand.

Business ventures

 * Zip2: started in 1995, a company that produced city guides for newspapers, sold in 1999 to Compaq.
 * PayPal: long story short - in 1999 Musk (using his Zip2 cash) and a few other men founded X.com, an online bank, which subsequently merged with its competitor Confinity in March of 2000. Confinity had already developed an early version of PayPal and released it in 1999. Musk was able to become CEO of the newly merged company but because the board found him to be a total shitgibbon they fired him in October 2000 while he was flying to Australia for his honeymoon; he was replaced by Peter Thiel. In subsequent litigation over his firing, he was able to negotiate that he be listed as one of the founders of PayPal (which is what Confinity was renamed in 2001), despite that, as noted, he didn't find himself listed as an official founder. Additionally, because he kept his stock holdings (about 11% of the total, making him the largest shareholder), when eBay bought PayPal in 2002, he made about $180 million in the deal.
 * SpaceX: started in 2002, a company that researches, develops, and manufactures spacecraft and (reusable) launch rockets, including development of the and testing it by putting an advertisement in Earth orbit (a Tesla). Alongside Boeing, SpaceX enables NASA to send American astronauts into space on American rockets, from American soil, for the first time since the final Space Shuttle mission in 2011 and is also developing {the most powerful space rocket yet,  In 2023, SpaceX made a "successful" launch of the Starship rocket the resulted in what SpaceX called a "rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation" and destruction of the launchpad — oops!
 * Tesla Motors: founded in 2003 by Musk Martin Eberhard (who was shoved out by Musk) a company that designs and manufactures semi-automated electric cars.
 * SolarCity: started in 2006, a company that manufactures and installs rooftop solar panels. Acquired by Tesla in 2016; its successor is Tesla Energy.
 * Hyperloop, announced in 2013, an as-yet-unfeasible rapid transit method that is basically a maglev train inside a vacuum tube. Musk wants this to compete with conventional high-speed rail.
 * OpenAI: started in 2015, a nonprofit intended to generate a general artificial intelligence (and avoid Roko's Basilisk). He left OpenAI in 2018.
 * Neuralink: started in 2016, a company intended to produce software and devices that can interface with the human brain. As of 2022, Neuralink is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. Musk has advocated both bad management practices (by telling employees to work faster by imagining a bomb strapped to their heads), and bad science practices (employees have alleged that "Neuralink launches tests in quick succession before fixing issues in earlier tests or drawing complete conclusions.")
 * The Boring Company: started in 2016, a company intended to reduce the cost of boring tunnels. This could come in handy if the Hyperloop manages to defy reality itself. In 2018, it was awarded a contract to provide an express train service from the O'Hare International Airport to downtown Chicago, scheduled to open in 2021. By September of the same year, however, nothing has been done, and the future of the project remains in doubt. So far, the Boring Company is not very exciting.
 * Thud: started in 2018, a company intended to produce comedic/satirical articles similar to The Onion, which Musk had attempted to purchase after it wrote satirical articles about him. After Musk pulled the rug out after 6 months, Thud made a muffled sound on the ground and did not come back up.
 * pravduh.com: started in 2018, a website intended to let people vote on the reliability of media sources, created after Musk received much negative media coverage in the same year. This turned out to be a minor temper tantrum, as there's no evidence the site ever had any content. Not to be confused with Pravda.ru, which actually has content of the bovine fecal variety.

Tesla Motors
Elon seems like one of the classic comedic showmen. Everything he does is a comedic bit. He’s always trying to get a laugh, that’s why he makes all his cars suicidal. Just watching everything burn, it’s entertaining, that’s for sure. Tesla Motors is a car company figure-headed by Elon Musk. It is famous for being the only company with a commercially available car floating in space. It makes electric cars, which made the news for catching fire. As it turns out, though, while Teslas caught fire, they did so at a much lower rate than the cars relying on controlled explosions of flammable material. However, putting out EV car fires is far more difficult than putting out internal combustion car fires, sometimes requiring more than 20,000 gallons of water. Tesla also makes cars that can drive themselves, but they often seem to crash while driving on their own.

Following the introduction of the "Autopilot" (advanced driver assistance) feature on Teslas in June 2022, there have been 17 fatalities, 736 crashes involving Teslas with the feature enabled. This number of Tesla crashes is far more than all other vehicles with driver assistance combined. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration senior safety adviser Missy Cummings has said that the number of fatalities per crash for Teslas has also been a concern. Musk's "decisions — such as widely expanding the availability of the features and stripping the vehicles of radar sensors — appear to have contributed to the reported uptick in incidents".

Coins for Cars
In late 2020, Tesla hinted that they would begin accepting Bitcoin for cars, which sent the already overpriced Bitcoin even higher. In early 2021, Tesla bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, and then in March made the actual announcement they'd sell cars in Bitcoin. Bitcoin skyrocketed even further, making Tesla's Bitcoins even more valuable. Then Tesla began selling off their Bitcoins, whereas Musk loudly insists didn't happen, just before refusing to accept Bitcoin for their cars in May 2021.

But there's another explanation that doesn't involve insider trading or market manipulation. During those two months, numerous problems with Bitcoin purchases became apparent, at least for the consumer. To purchase a Tesla, you have to place a deposit of $2500 or equivalent value in Bitcoin. If you cancelled before the car was made you got a refund, but if the deposit was made in Bitcoin, Tesla got to choose whether to pay you Bitcoins or cash. I.e., if Bitcoin went down, you got Bitcoin, but if it went up, you got cash. The US also has "lemon laws" for defective cars, colloquially known as "lemons", where you can be compensated if the manufacturer gives you a lemon. But if you paid for your car in Bitcoin, you guessed it, Tesla could compensate you in whichever currency was worth less. Purchasing itself was a hassle; when given a quote, you had 30 minutes to complete the purchase or you would have to get a new quote. This was needed because of Bitcoin's notoriously volatile price, as otherwise the purchaser could change their mind as Bitcoin fluctuated. Most charitably, this whole debacle was such a miserable experience for everyone involved, and not the image that Musk wants for Tesla.

Twitter
Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion on October 28, 2022, after first engaging in the deal, then backing out, then going to court, and then reversing course and forking over the cash. It might be an elaborate ploy to make money out of Twitter (somehow) or serve other interests, but even as a libertarian it is hard to believe he cares about 'anything goes' free speech. In any case the whole process has been fraught with his typical attention seeking derp behaviour, highly manipulative tactics, and weird and douchey tweets/comments including personal attacks on well known figures. He claims there will still be moderation, so we're not sure what that means for "protecting free speech". Predictably, his adoring fans have eaten up everything he has done so far, praising every move he has made as "genius" and believing that Musk actually cares about anyone but himself.

As for how the site is post-acquisition, it's gone about as well as you'd expect. In a short time, he's fired the CEO, CFO and CLO, and this happened. Not great, to say the least.

Trashing Twitter's verification system
Shortly after the acquisition, Musk used his genius skills to roll out a plan to supposedly shore up Twitter's revenue, by allowing anyone to get a "verified" check mark simply by paying $8 a month. Previously, this check mark was only available to public personalities in order to help distinguish Twitter accounts actually run by a public person, instead of being one of the many parody and troll accounts that run rampant on that social network. Predictably, by changing the requirements to only a small cash payment, this allowed for trolls to easily create fake "official" Twitter accounts for shitposting... such as tweeting a picture of  giving the middle finger, "official" professional sports players "announcing" fake trades, and "official" accounts of Tony Blair and George W. Bush musing on how they "miss killing Iraqis". Unsurprisingly, some of those impersonating celebrities went beyond shitposting to promote cryptocurrency scams.

Musk, who previously tweeted that "comedy is now legal on Twitter" after purchasing the company (in reference to—before he bought the company—the Babylon Bee getting suspended from Twitter for transphobia), used his "free speech absolutist" principles to permaban the impersonation accounts off the platform. Consequently, an especially popular permaban speedrun during this period, particularly among comedians and Internet personalities, was for people with already verified accounts to rename themselves as Elon Musk and start trolling the "Chief Twit".

In late March 2023, Musk once again announced that beginning April 1 2023, Twitter will start removing "legacy verified checkmarks" in favor of a system where users and organizations pay for "verified" checkmarks ($8-$11 a month for users and $12,000 a year for organizations), though purportedly there was exemptions for the top 10,000 organizations by follower count. Predictably, most people balked, feeling that there was no value in a system where "verified" only means that one has given Musk money. As April 1st passed, it was clear that whether or not the check was removed was haphazard and entirely on Musk's whims; while many people's verified check marks stayed, in a sign of his continued hostility to American media (and his tendency to break promises), the one notable verified checkmark he took away was from the Twitter account of the New York Times.

Evidently, the checkmark purge had been set back about three weeks. On April 20, 2023, the remaining nonpaying verified users began losing their checkmarks... for the most part. Things went just swell after that. Imposter accounts immediately flooded the site, including imposters for government agencies who immediately began shitposting misinformation. IRS accounts lost verification, opening the door to potential scams. The attempt to monetize legacy verified users didn't work very well. Twitter only saw a net increase of 28 paid subscriptions among them in the first day (or about 400, according to a separate claim). Two days in, the net signups had risen to about 700 (about $5,600 in profit). That's out of around 300,000 legacy verified users. Some of those new subscriptions (at least three) were personally paid for by Musk himself. Bizarrely (considering Twitter's trouble with advertisers), Musk also started demanding that any business not spending $1000 a month on Twitter needed to subscribe in order to run advertisements on the platform. Let us know how that ultimatum works out for you.

In fact, several prominent Twitter users responded to Musk's move by announcing that they intended to block every single Twitter Blue subscriber, due to a perceived low quality content and higher prevalence of trolls, crypto-bros, Musk sycophants, and scammers in that group. Musk managed to turn Twitter verification into a "digital dunce cap", as one Forbes writer put it, adding: "It's honestly shocking to see the blue checkmark become so hated so quickly. There may not be anything like it in the relatively short history of social media." But Musk wasn't finished. He retaliated with seemingly-mandatory verification for his detractors. For one case — (a popular shitposting account) — Twitter repeatedly added the checkmark, and dril repeatedly removed it. So apparently "spite checkmarks" are a thing now. Ultimately, Twitter provided "complimentary" paid verification to anyone with over a million followers. Including dead people. John McCain will be happy to hear from beyond the grave that he remains verified on Twitter.

What makes this particularly hilarious is that the verification system arose out of a legal dispute circa Twitter's inception, where the company agreed that they are liable for any damages caused by impersonation. In June 2009, MLB manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter over a parody account impersonating him. That account mocked the then-manager of the St. Louis Cardinals with tweets like: “Lost 2 out of 3, but we made it out of Chicago without one drunk driving incident or dead pitcher.” While the lawsuit was settled out of court, it nevertheless was the catalyst that caused Twitter to roll out the Verified Accounts feature as it was originally implemented for more than a decade.

Shitposters vs. advertisers
Two days after the acquisition, Hillary Clinton tweeted a condemnation of a recent assault of Nancy Pelosi's husband. As the alleged suspect was reportedly fueled by conspiracy theories and misinformation, Clinton also accused the "Republican Party and its mouthpieces" of regularly spreading "hate and deranged conspiracy theories", linked the assault to the misinformation, and demanded accountability. Musk responded back with a tweet containing a "news article"... an article that happened to be a completely deranged, hateful conspiracy theory about Pelosi's husband from a well known fake news site, essentially proving Clinton's point.

Although a re-evaluation of contracts is not unusual whenever leadership changes, Musk's buyout caused quite a bit more concerns than you typically see during an acquisition. Before the buyout, Musk had built up a following among the generally right-wing "shitpost" crowd due to Musk's "free speech absolutist" philosophy and, starting in the early 2020s, increasing amounts of tweets dabbling with fringe right-wing memes, including a tweet with the "red pill" meme and the use of "woke" as a snarl word. Some of these shitposters (some who have had their accounts suspended on Twitter and elsewhere for things like transphobia, COVID-19 misinformation, the Big Lie of Donald Trump, and racist and homophobic slurs) therefore cheered when Musk bought Twitter.

Advertisers, however, make up 90% of Twitter's revenue, and advertisers have long considered "brand safety" to be of utmost importance. Many companies do not want to see their advertisements placed next to any inappropriate content, which includes fake news, extremism, and hate. When even the "Chief Twit" CEO is tweeting out hateful misinformation from a fake news site, it is no surprise that many advertisers paused their spending on Twitter shortly after the buyout in order to evaluate what direction Musk will take with Twitter's content moderation policy.

The fake-verified-blue-check debacle added the concerns of advertisers, as trolls not only impersonated celebrities, they also impersonated corporations. Probably the most notable corporate impersonation was a fake "official" account created to impersonate, which made a shitpost tweet on November 10 2022 that declared that "insulin is free now". This tweet possibly caused a stock price plunge that day that erased billions in Eli Lilly's market cap. Of further concern to companies was Twitter's slow response time to complaints that demanded that these fake accounts be taken down, largely because of Musk's massive headcount reduction in Twitter's communications department. This further pissed off advertisers, causing more of them to pause advertising due to concerns over "brand safety".

Musk's initial reaction to the advertiser pause, of course, was to deflect. First, he blamed "activists" for the revenue drop (claiming "they're trying to destroy free speech in America"),, and then he threatened to "thermonuclear name & shame" advertisers who were "boycotting". Then he used his "free speech" principles to block a prominent marketing executive who questioned how brand safety can be maintained when Musk "just laid off 75% of the moderation team."

Musk, however, equally pissed off the shitposters by insisting that "Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies" and actually agreeing to talk with civil rights leaders. Pissing off the shitposters further, Musk also defended and stood by Twitter's head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth, who was a previous target of the MAGA crowd when fact-checking labels started to be added to Donald Trump's tweets, and old tweets made from Roth resurfaced that called Trump a "racist tangerine".

Musk vs. Twitter employees
Musk, however, wasn't done pissing people off: the next step he undertook was to try to piss off Twitter's employees. On November 10 2022, Musk sent his first email to all Twitter employees as CEO. In the email, Musk warned that the "road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed" and painted a bleak picture of Twitter's future. In the process, he nixed Twitter's previous generous work-from-home policy instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Of course, the letter failed to mention that a significant portion of Twitter's financial woes at the time were Musk-inflicted damage, caused by Musk massively overpaying for Twitter and adding $13 billion in corporate debt, meaning Twitter was on the hook to pay $1 billion in interest payments annually.)

Multiple Twitter executives (including the aforementioned Roth) that made it past Musk's initial firings expressed confidence in the genius of Musk's plans by handing in their resignation papers that week. Later that week, Musk fired multiple employees for the cardinal sin of responding to Musk's super-genius public tweets explaining how, when it came to his tweets about the technical details of Twitter, Musk had absolutely no clue what he was talking about.

The next week, on Wednesday November 16, Musk sent a mass email ultimatum to all employees, declaring that Twitter was shifting to an "engineer-driven operation" of whom the employees "will need to be extremely hardcore" going forward, "working long hours at high intensity". Within that email was a button asking them to commit to Musk's "hardcore" vision. Those that disagreed with Musk's genius visionary management style (e.g., seemingly a "slave-driving" -style work environment where one must also be an ass-kissing yes-man to Musk) could resign from Twitter at 5PM on Thursday November 17, with three months severance pay. Twitter stalled and short-changed severance payments for many who took the option, later the subject of a class-action lawsuit.

The result was predictable, given Musk's callous and disrespectful attitude towards his employees: a reported mass exodus, to the point where Twitter had to shut its doors on Friday November 18 in order to protect its systems and data. Initial reports estimated the exodus to include at least 1200 full-time employees, including 96% of the "core services" team and several entire departments. The team dedicated to countering child sexual abuse on the platform was cut in half, leaving behind an "overwhelmed skeleton crew". One former Twitter executive commented that with so many employees leaving, Twitter "will struggle just to keep the lights on". "#RIPTwitter" became the #1 trending topic on US Twitter in reaction to this news.

On December 13 2022, reports emerged that Twitter was not paying any rent for the offices Musk was requiring employees to work from, and was discussing denying severance payments to the thousands of people who had been laid off since the takeover. Twitter was later sued by its landlord for allegedly failing to pay its rent. Twitter employees were evicted from the company's office in Singapore — noted as its headquarters for the Asia-Pacific region — for unpaid rents as well. Reportedly, this fate was set to hit about a dozen Twitter offices for the same reason. Around the same time, the company began auctioning off supplies from its offices such as coffee machines, chairs, statues, and sculptures.

In early February 2023, around the time a major global outage occurred on the platform, Twitter also managed to piss off developers of third party clients, maintainers of non-nefarious bots, celebrities that use tools for social media management, social media researchers, and more by announcing that third party access to the Twitter API  that made this third party ecosystem possible would no longer be free for anyone.  Meanwhile, in a sign of Musk's continuing god complex, a report emerged around that time that Musk fired an engineer simply for suggesting that his declining engagement numbers on the platform were simply because public interest in his shitshow was waning. This revelation also resulted in Musk ordering a change to Twitter's "ranked timeline" that ensured that Musk's tweets were heavily promoted, whether you liked it or not.

The company shed more employees in February 2023, leaving Twitter with a little less than 2,000 employees (down from around 7,500 in October 2022). In the same month, according to Twitter had four outages; in addition, researchers and users were noticing more bugs popping up that affected Twitter's usability. On March 6th, yet another major site-wide outage was reported. (According to Netblocks, Twitter only had nine outages in the entire year of 2022).

On March 7 2023, Musk received widespread criticism for bullying and mocking an entrepreneur who founded a prominent web design company called Ueno whose company Twitter acquired in 2021. Þorleifsson was also disabled and a wheelchair user, having Reportedly Þorleifsson was fired from Twitter during the February layoffs, but received no email confirmations about the termination (merely noticing that he was locked out of his Twitter account). So he appealed to Musk directly on Twitter to determine whether he had been sacked. Musk callously responded with multiple tweets with shitpost memes as well as claims that "this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work", along with a questioning of Þorleifsson's disability, calling it an "excuse". (Surprisingly, Musk issued a rare apology for the extremely unprofessional, possibly litigable behavior a few hours afterwards.)

Musk, content moderation dictator
Please be super vocal if there is something dumb I'm doing or not doing. That would be greatly appreciated. All of the pandering to advertisers about content moderation (including a previous assertion in early November that Musk would not make major decisions about restoring banned accounts before setting up a "content moderation council" with diverse viewpoints) ended up being a bunch of bullshit. By November 19 2022, Musk's Twitter had reinstated several accounts previously banned for hate, harassment, and election conspiracy bullshit. These names included manosphere grifter Andrew Tate (suspended in 2017 for advocating that women should "bare [sic] some responsibility" for being sexually assaulted), Jordan Peterson (suspended for transphobic tweets about Babylon Bee (suspended for transphobic tweets about  and Donald Trump (banned for inciting violence in early 2021, and still promoting the Big Lie 2020 election conspiracy at the time of his reinstatement).

Musk, however, was also still pissing off some shitposters at that time due to announcing what effectively was a shadowban system ("Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized") on November 18, and refusing to reinstate Alex Jones's Twitter account.

On November 29 2022, Twitter announced that it would no longer enforce its policy against misleading information about COVID-19, potentially opening up the platform further to scam artists and grifters pushing anti-vaccination or potentially dangerous alternative medicine woo. To no one's surprise, this category includes Musk himself, who managed to combine a tasteless transphobic joke with a baseless call to prosecute (based on bullshit repeated ad nauseam by extremist Republicans like Rand Paul and Jim Jordan) in a couple of tweets made in mid December 2022.

On December 12 2022, Musk's Twitter dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, an advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights, and other organizations formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, and other problems on the platform. In addition, on this same day, reports emerged that the once cordial relationship between Yoel Roth and Musk had developed into a feud after Roth left the company. This culminated in Musk releasing internal documents concerning Roth managing Donald Trump's ban, and (using a tired tactic of his) calling Roth a pedophile. Musk's baseless pedophile claim resulted in an escalation of threats against Roth, forcing him to flee his home.

Reports emerged that Musk used his "free speech absolutism" to ban activists who documented extremism and violence among the alt-right, under the guise of them being "antifa". Reportedly the bans were enacted at the request of the notoriously whiny anti-left agitator Andy Ngo. In addition, again unsurprisingly, some users claimed to be banned from Twitter simply for being even remotely critical of Musk in a tweet. A Twitter bot account that tracked the location of Musk's private jet (using public information), which made headlines in January 2022 when the operator refused a $5000 payment from Musk to delete the account, was, in the name of "free speech absolutism", banned from Twitter on December 14 2022.

Musk's "free speech absolutism" became suspect when he banned the Twitter accounts of several mainstream media journalists who had been covering Musk, as well as the Twitter account of rival social network On December 18, Musk further dented his "free speech absolutism" claim when he banned links to content on several other social networks, as well as some link aggregators. One month later, Musk continued to demonstrate how his "free speech absolutist" claim was bullshit (particularly perhaps when it came to appeasing authoritarian demands) when in late January 2023 Twitter censored links to a BBC documentary critical of Narendra Modi (a documentary which in particular highlighted Modi's troubling connections to the 2002 Gujarat riots.) In April 2023, Musk's Twitter started blocking links to the blogging platform on the grounds that they were launching a Twitter-like service called Substack Notes. On April 19, 2023, Twitter suspended a reporter from  for simply reporting on an incident where Matt Walsh's Twitter account was hacked.

As one would expect, more companies continued "pausing" their Twitter commitments due to the chaos, including pauses that went beyond advertising, such as a decision by to (very temporarily) step back from Twitter on November 18 2022. By one account, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers had paused advertising on Twitter by mid November 2022; this figure had increased to 72 out of 100 by December 17 2022. Also during that month, advertisers started to be told that they "needed to become comfortable" with Musk's unpredictability and uncertainty. As of February 2023, over half (625) of Twitter's top 1,000 pre-acquisition advertisers had fled. Asked during an April 2023 interview to name a single advertiser who had left and then returned, Musk could not do so.

In early April 2023, Musk released the source code of Twitter's recommendation engine. Among the findings, Musk has his own special category in the engine (perhaps explaining why users report seeing his messages so prominently), and certain topics like "Ukraine" seemed to be suppressed. Separately, in further signs of the "free speech absolutism" of Musk's Twitter, others noted that if one uses certain words like "transgender", "gay", "lesbian", or "bisexual" in a Tweet, the message wouldn't preview when shared via direct message (which implies these are now flagged as inflammatory or sensitive terms). Shortly thereafter, Twitter revoked its policy banning targeted deadnaming and misgendering of transgender people — a move by Musk that had been anticipated since November 2022.

Continuing Musk's war with media, in April 2023, Twitter started randomly labeling various news outlets such as NPR, BBC, and CBC as "government-funded media" – which Twitter says implies government may have editorial say – or "state-affiliated media" (which generally suggests propaganda), rather than "publicly-funded media" (which even on Twitter remains non-pejorative). Previously Twitter only used the more concerning labels for media outlets that essentially served as government mouthpieces (such as Russia's RT or China's ); in contrast, under Musk these labels were slapped on outlets that, while publicly funded by various degrees, had editorial independence from the government; in some cases (such as NPR), the government provided very little of the operating budget. Multiple media outlets around the world, beginning with NPR and PBS, responded to the inaccurate labels by exiting Twitter. Twitter soon removed media labels entirely, including for Russian and Chinese state media.

In May 2023, Musk was criticized for yet another dent in his purported "free speech absolutism" claim. Prior to a critical election in Turkey, where voters determined whether or not Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would be re-elected, Twitter announced that certain content would be restricted in order to prevent the entire site from being blocked in that country (a tactic the often-authoritarian Erdoğan government had used quite often in the past to suppress criticism.) This move was seen by many as kowtowing to Erdoğan. In response to a critical tweet by journalist Musk defended the decision by implying that it was preferable to have a few tweets throttled rather than have Twitter throttled in its entirety. This earned a strong rebuke from Wikipedia founder who cited Wikipedia's own censorship battles with Erdoğan's government to chide Musk for not treating "freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan." Under Musk, Twitter has complied with government demands more often.

About the same time, reports emerged of widely-circulated animal abuse content suggested prominently by Twitter's internal search engine. This included a particularly notorious video, which appeared as a suggestion if a user searched for "cat". Between that and reports of widely-viewed child abuse content (again, after gutting the team dedicating to fighting child exploitation, along with other moderation crews), priorities are clearly in the right place. It is unknown why companies are hesitant to place advertisements for their products next to this sort of content.

On June 1 2023, the Daily Wire reported that they had been in talks with Twitter to set up a paid advertiser campaign to promote a transphobic "documentary" by Matt Walsh called What is a Woman?. Twitter staff, however, backed out after reviewing the film, and warned the Daily Wire that although they could still post the video, the film would be flagged as "hateful content" under Twitter's policies. This, naturally, infuriated Twitter's right-wing trolls. At this point, Musk decided to throw his safety employees under the bus, and (after a small bit of hesitation) worked to ensure that the hateful content promoted by the Daily Wire would not be labeled as hateful content on Twitter. Musk later shared the video on his feed with the comment "every parent should watch this" (while also promoting a number of anti-trans talking points elsewhere). This incident resulted in yet even more staff resignations, among them Ella Irwin (VP of trust and safety, who had just taken the post when previous head Yoel Roth left in November 2022), Maie Aiyed (Twitter brand safety partnerships program director), and AJ Brown (head of brand safety and ad quality).

On June 21 2023, Elon Musk use his increasingly doublespeak-y "free speech absolutism" principles, as well as his increasing transphobia, to declare that "cis" and "cisgender" were now considered slurs on Twitter and that users who engaged in "harassment" with these words would face consequences.

At the beginning of July 2023, Musk (fresh off of making headlines for immaturely challenging social media rival CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a style "cage match")  decided to impose severe rate limits on Twitter, which in effect broke the user experience for most Twitter users. Musk also enacted a change which required one to be logged in before viewing content; previously public tweets were viewable by anyone. Although Musk claimed that the new supposed "temporary" "emergency" rate limits were enacted to deal with "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation" purportedly being done by artificial intelligence companies, many commentators didn't buy that explanation, speculating that either Musk refused to pay for some critical Twitter infrastructure, or that the forced login change caused a technical issue severe enough to effectively self- the site. The changes also broke Twitter management tools like Advertising industry experts saw the change as yet another blunder that would drive away advertisers en masse (of those that hadn't fled already, that is). This sudden self-PWNED moment caused a surge in interest in rival platforms, such as Mastodon, Spill, and even Truth Social.

Probably not entirely coincidentally, on Monday July 3 2023, Zuckerberg's new rival Twitter clone, showed up on mobile application stores for "pre-saving" with a scheduled launch date of July 6 2023. This launch was reportedly quite successful, with 100 million reported users signed up in less than a week (in part thanks to Threads sharing a user base with Instagram). On Monday July 10 2023, Musk's response to this was to engage in extremely cringe and embarrassing juvenile taunts, challenging Zuckerberg to a literal dick measuring contest and calling Zuckerberg the old and tired default insult of the alt-right, a "cuck".

Not coincidentally, also on Monday July 10 2023, Musk's shithole got praised by the fucking Taliban of all things for its "pro-free speech policies" while calling out Threads as "intolerant" for not bothering to put up with extremist pollution.

Musk, just another right-wing edgelord troll
Musk continued his descent from futuristic tech CEO into just another shitposting edgelord troll on November 28 2022. The overnight tweetstorm included tweets with a Pepe the Frog image, an image of Baked Alaska that was quickly deleted, and a fake "CNN headline" created by a small right-leaning satire site called Genesius Times (tweeted, of course, without any context to the real source whatsoever). Musk continued to be Very Concerned about what he called "free speech", while also simultaneously displaying "concerns" in other tweets about there needing to be a "counter-narrative" for supposed "far left San Francisco/Berkeley views" as well as a supposed "woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide." Of course, all those advertisers who paused Twitter ads, in Musk's mind, also hated "free speech" as well, because apparently "free speech" in Muskland means "paying Elon Musk money". Meanwhile, Twitter's radically reduced anti-propaganda team experienced noticeable difficulty stopping an apparent pro-China spam campaign that was attempting to flood out any information on Twitter regarding the

An analysis of Musk's replies and exchanges on his Twitter account by  published on November 28 2022, indicated that increasingly Musk was living in a right-wing "filter bubble". Musk's approving chats heavily consisted of accounts associated with Gamergate and/or alt-right figures, conservative activists, crypto bros, and Tesla "fan groups" that praised every announcement he made and LOLed at every shitpost he tweeted. On the flip side, Musk tended to mock and act flippantly towards criticisms coming from Democratic politicians, as well as making fun of the mainstream American media in general (the later probably due to Musk's thin-skinned inability to handle criticism.)

A March 2023 BBC analysis of Twitter by indicated that at that time, due to Musk's decimation of safety teams, trolls ran rampant on the platform, targeted harassment campaigns (including those originated by state sanctioned campaigns) aimed at curbing freedom of expression were common, and abusive misogyny had increased. Musk's response to the article was to tweet that "trolls are kinda fun"; also predictably, Twitter trolls responded to the report by directed a torrent of abusive posts at the reporter.

In early April 2023, Musk unexpectedly changed the Twitter logo above the home icon (and elsewhere) into the logo for the cryptocurrency. Not coincidentally, at that time, Musk was being sued by a group of investors accusing Musk of running a "pyramid scheme" with Dogecoin, by manipulating the Dogecoin market with his tweets.

Due to Musk firing Twitter's communications team, as of March 2023 (under a new policy change instituted by Musk), any mail sent to these accounts will be automatically replied to with a "poop emoji". Which ironically happens to also be a great description of Twitter under Musk's leadership.

Climate change misinformation/disinformation
In the past, Musk had advocated pro-sustainable energy stances (and was a significant spokesman of such), as one would expect from the CEO of the company that essentially kick-started the electric vehicle market with Tesla. Publicly during this time period, Musk was strongly concerned about climate change, and was fervently against climate science deniers. In 2017, Musk told that "climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI". In October 2016, in response to a interview where the coal baron (and John Oliver arch-nemesis)  called Tesla a fraud, Musk tweeted "Real fraud going on is denial of climate science." Musk even broke off his council associations with Donald Trump after Trump stepped away from the

Since taking Twitter over, Musk's priorities have shifted to shitposting transphobic jokes and hanging out with his conspiracy theory-loving sycophants on the platform. While Musk is not a climate change denier (at least at this time), this shift in focus has resulted in a considerably diminished focus on his previous stance championing the fight against climate change.

Besides allowing vicious attacks on climate scientists on Twitter (to the point with many climate scientists, fed up with the racism, sexism, and climate-denying trolls and bots on the platform, have simply left) and prioritizing results from climate change deniers on Twitter, Musk has himself posted climate change misinformation: Important to note that what happens on Earth’s surface (eg farming) has no meaningful impact on climate change. Overwhelmingly, the risk of climate change is due to moving billions of tons of carbon from deep underground into the atmosphere.

In fact, land use change (LUC) impacts the balance of the Earth's carbon cycle by altering the land's carbon carrying capacity, for example where rainforest is replaced by farmland. According to the annual Global Carbon Budget study, 11% of the annual net increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is currently a direct result of LUC, while cumulatively LUC is responsible for one third of anthropogenic CO2 emissions since 1750. While the impact of fossil fuel combustion is undoubtedly greater, it is straight up climate denial to state that LUC has "no meaningful impact".

LUC also significantly impacts the atmospheric concentration of the other key greenhouse gases, methane  and nitrous oxide.

LUC additionally affects climate conditions by changing biophysical properties such as albedo, evapotranspiration and surface roughness. Although these effects are generally more localised than changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, localised climate change is still relevant when considering climate change impacts.

If human civilisation had acted more quickly to transition away from fossil fuels, we could afford to ignore the effect of LUC on climate in the short to medium term. However, as decades of inaction has brought us to the point of climate crisis, addressing the impact of LUC will be necessary if we are to meet goals such as the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C and the European Union's ambition of net zero emissions by 2050.

Aside from the issue of LUC, modern agriculture and forestry systems are also highly dependent on petroleum-based fertilizers, energy-intensive machinery for planting and harvesting, and transportation networks that are still largely powered by fossil fuels. The IPCC groups these factors alongside the effect of LUC itself under the heading Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU), which they say was responsible for 22% of net global CO2-eq GHG emissions in the year 2019.

Musk has also downplayed the threat of climate change to various degrees on several occasions. In an August 2022 tweet, for instance, Musk seemed to put more prominence in depopulation conspiracy theories than climate change. ("Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.") On May 5 2023, in response to a tweet from Mike Cernovich calling "global warming" "the largest scam in human history.", Musk replied that "global warming risk is overblown in the short term, but significant in the long term."

Musk has also taken several public stances against government and business initiatives that address climate change, but didn't happen to benefit the pockets of Musk. For instance, Musk came out against Joe Biden's bill, due to what critics saw as irritation at other automobile companies getting more subsidies than Tesla. Likewise, right after Tesla was booted from "ESG index", Musk called environmential, social, and governance (ESG) a "scam" that was " weaponized by phony social justice warriors". (The reason for S&P excluding Tesla was due to racism at Tesla's factories.)

The future
Musk's Twitter problems were so significant, they affected his primary company Tesla as well. Between April 4 2022 (the date Musk first disclosed he took a 9% stake in Twitter) and December 15 2022, Musk's primary company, Tesla, lost a staggering $705 billion in market capitalization. The Twitter purchase was not the only reason for the decline, however it was clear that Twitter played a significant factor. Many investors were not happy with Musk seemingly abandoning Tesla in order to badly mismanage Twitter. Investors also were not happy at Musk using Tesla stock as a "piggy bank" to help finance propping up his favorite shitposting platform. Many analysts also noted that Tesla's previously sky-high stock price relied, in part, on Musk's reputation as a genius futurist. Musk's mismanagement misadventures at Twitter cracked that facade, and thus damaged the Tesla brand and helped damage Tesla's stock price. As an added headache, Musk's increasingly hyper-partisan conspiracy theory and political oriented tweets added additional Tesla brand damage. Particularly considering that the left-leaning people that Musk is obsessively attacking were always the ones most likely to buy a Tesla, while conservatives are the least likely to do so.

Perhaps with this in mind, on December 18 2022, Musk posted a Twitter poll asking whether or not he should continue as CEO of Twitter, claiming he would abide by the results. The poll closed on Monday, with the result (57.5%) clearly showing most voters in favor of him leaving the CEO position. After initially appearing to want to move the goalposts and change the rules for the poll, on Tuesday December 20 2022, Musk gave in... sort of. Musk tweeted that he would "resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!", while still maintaining that he would run the "software & servers teams". Of course, this was seen by many as mere "window dressing", and that he would retain significant influence over the company regardless of whether he was CEO or not.

On May 12 2023, Musk announced that, previously an advertising chief executive at NBCUniversal, would become Twitter's new CEO. Musk would still be involved as executive chairman and chief technology officer.

Even with the above, what the future holds for the platform is uncertain, but more than likely it will become even more of a lawless wasteland than it was before. If it manages to still exist, that is.

Sociopathy
Court lawyer: Do you have some kind of unique ability to identify narcissistic sociopaths?

Musk: You mean by looking in the mirror?

...

Court lawyer: And, sir, since you've brought it up, do you think that you're a narcissistic sociopath?

Musk: No. For someone who has ostensibly created some ventures that could be called good for society (pioneering electric vehicle manufacture, installing rooftop solar, more questionably others), Musk and Tesla have exhibit repeated and disturbing signs of narcissistic sociopathy (superficial charm, lying, intentionally causing harm to others).

Musk believes in the theory that all of existence is a simulated reality and has dedicated millions of dollars towards proving an unfalsifiable hypothesis true, rather than using that money to do something beneficial. Presumably, he believes in this theory because he believes it could absolve him of any accountability regarding his actions. Musk's apparent belief that reality is a simulation would appear to be a rationalization for Musk doing whatever the fuck he wants. When one is the richest person on the planet one can do a very good job of creating a walled garden to keep out things that one doesn't want to confront by just throwing money at them.

Adjacent to Musk's sociopathy, is his support for longtermism — the idea that interplanetary colonization or creating virtual realities of trillions of virtual people in space is more important than dealing with current world problems or even foreseeable extinction level events, including climate change. Musk has shown support for longtermerist ideas, including William MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future, calling the book "a close match for my philosophy."

Musk, himself
…his gift is not empathy with people. Musk either thinks that he is a big gorilla, or he knows that is a manospherian, declaring to his first wife at their wedding in 2000, "I am the alpha in this relationship." He later treated her like a slightly privileged employee, later telling her often, "If you were my employee, I would fire you." In 2020, Musk tweeted a call to "Take the Red pill 🌹". The term "red pill" was popularized by the manosphere and absorbed into the larger alt-right. It is possible however that Musk was referring to the original use in the film series The Matrix, which would agree with his simulated reality belief. Years after The Matrix was released, the filmmakers revealed in 2016 that films were actually a reflection of their transsexuality. Although the red rose in Musk's tweet is a symbol of social democracy, Musk is known to be strongly against this ideology.

On March 6, 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when vaccines were not available, Musk said, "The coronavirus panic is dumb". By March 17, state and local officials were ordering lockdowns to prevent further spread of COVID and the overburdening hospitals that did eventuate. On March 19, Musk stated, "Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in the US too by the end of April". Contrary to what the boy genius predicted, daily case counts have yet to drop to zero as of December 2021, and the daily peak was 218,000 in January 2021 before vaccines were widely available. By April, Musk was complaining about lockdowns. In May 2020, Musk opened his Fremont, California Tesla factory in defiance of Alameda County health orders. As a result, he personally caused 450 COVID cases.

After resigning, a Tesla employee returned to work just to say goodbye to colleagues. Musk shoved and threatened the employee by saying "I will nuke you."

Regarding alleged rampant racism against African Americans at a Tesla factory, for which Tesla is being sued by the State of California, Musk advised that victims of racism should get a "thick skin".

On a private jet, Musk allegedly offered a flight attendant a horse in exchange for sex after he had exposed his erect penis and touched her. The attendant refused and was awarded $250,000 in an out of court settlement.

Musk told the UN he would donate much of his fortune to end world hunger if they told him exactly how they would spend it, and then, when they gave him precisely what he wanted, a detailed program explaining exactly what they would use his money for, he refused. Of course, he reneged on his part of the deal.

Companies, by proxy
Tesla has repeatedly rolled out new and potentially-dangerous (a not fully-functional 'auto pilot', 'Insane' mode ) or on-its-face features (driver-accessible video games ) that are tested on existing car owners rather than going through extensive in-house testing. Tesla has 3 times the number of driver deaths compared to other vehicles in its car class (BMW, Lexus, and Mercedes).

In 2021, Tesla was sued by six women who worked at Tesla factories, alleging that there was "rampant sexual harassment" and "nightmarish conditions" at the factories. The lawsuit alleged that the abuse is effectively encouraged by Musk's lewd tweets. A woman who was an engineer at SpaceX has also said that she suffered sexual harassment there and that there was rampant misogyny.

A former contract worker at Tesla was awarded $137 million in a discrimination suit against Tesla that had alleged racist epithets, discrimination and a hostile work environment.

Being a whistleblower seems to be grounds for immediate termination at Tesla despite it being illegal for Tesla to do so.

As part of Musk's shambolic 2022 takeover of Twitter, the entire Twitter office in Ghana was terminated, the only office in the entire continent of Africa except for one employee. The employees were not mentioned by name and not offered severance pay, thus the employees were being treated like objects and not like people.

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Tweets
Despite being a rock star of scientific progress and innovation, a busy professional with a million things to do and a good understanding of the essential importance of good communication, Musk still finds time to tweet stupid shit every now and then. He apparently loves Tweeting so much, he bought 9.2% of Twitter, making him the single largest shareholder of the company. You might also notice Twitter has 11 board members, and 9.2% is more than 1/11th of the company, enough to permanently make yourself a board member without any voting necessary. Which is exactly what happened.

"Marx was a capitalist"
By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.

Musk makes the common mistake of mixing up Marxist socialism with modern welfare social democracy. While he may be somewhat right in his interpretation of Marxist socialism as "the greatest good for all", modern welfare social democracy concerns itself with reducing poverty and misery and funding a large range of basic social services without abandoning capitalism. In either case, he describes socialism in a way that neither makes sense in Marxist socialism nor modern welfare social-democracy "the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm". This is a gross misrepresentation of Marxist socialism and doesn't remotely resemble modern welfare social democracy.

Boring boneheads
After his flagship company, Tesla, posted a massive loss it could be imagined that analysts would want to know why. Musk was busy telling everyone that things were fine when he said:

This briefly bummed out the investors and Tesla stock dropped 5% (about $3 billion).

Tesla
In 2019, Musk tweeted that the company may go private.

For whatever reason he did this (who knows?), he broke the law as it was of a speculative nature. While the company wasn't destined to go private, the market took the tweet seriously, and some investors lost millions in the speculation game. Investors initiated a lawsuit, which is still in the courts. Somehow Musk survived this colossally stupid move. Though in fairness, Tesla is currently worth about 10x what it was when Musk made that tweet; had he gone through with the deal it would've been the greatest business deal in modern history.

However, clearly, this wasn't enough. In 2020, while he was busy denying the serious nature of COVID-19, he also made a casual claim that his company was "over-valued".

This led to a huge drop in market value with himself losing billions in value. It is unlikely any of this will stop Musk from making stupid, pointless, destructive comments in the future about the value or future of the company.

Transphobia
Musk, despite his brainchild Tesla being well-known for its inclusiveness of LGBTQ+ people, has also made quite a few attacks on the use of pronouns for non-binary individuals. After facing much backlash after infamously tweeting "pronouns suck", Musk went on to make the following even-more damning follow-up tweet a few months later:

I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare.

It also didn't help Musk's case that he additionally shared a meme of a soldier rubbing his face with bloody hands and a hat with the words "I Love To Oppress", with the caption ""when you put he/him in ur bio" The meme is known as "The Eternal Anglo" The term 'The Eternal Anglo' is based on the antisemitic 1940 film produced in Nazi Germany. The Eternal Anglo meme is purportedly primarily used by fascistic German and Slavic speakers to demonize English-speaking countries but has morphed into other usage within the larger alt-right.

In 2022, Musk's transgender daughter has cut ties with him, saying "I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form". She has legally changed her surname to Wilson. In response, Musk blamed "full-on communism" in universities.

In April 2023, Musk continued his anti-trans campaign by removing the Twitter policy against deadnaming. In June 2023, he promoted Matt Walsh's anti-trans "What is a Woman?" schlockumentary. Further, he agreed with a post by Jordan Peterson suggesting that transgender-affirming therapists should be imprisoned. Musk also announced that he will personally "be actively lobbying to criminalize making severe, irreversible changes to children below the age of consent". He further agreed that "LGB" should be separated from "TQ+"; a potentially peculiar statement since Musk doesn't proclaim any sort of non-heterosexual identity and thus has little grounds to decide on such topics.

Antisemitism
In 2023, Musk continued to flirt with antisemitism. Shortly after George Soros sold all of his Tesla stock, Musk targeted him not for selling the stock but by comparing Soros to the Jewish villain ("Soros reminds me of Magneto" ) from Marvel Comics, and Tweeting: You assume they are good intentions [of Soros]. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity. It doesn't help matters that antisemitic tweets greatly increased after Musk took over Twitter, which one must assume Musk is perfectly fine with since he eviserated the Trust and Safety team at Twitter. Within a few days that Musk claimed a free speech absolutist defense ("I mean, uh, freedom of speech. I’m allowed to say what I want.") for saying bigoted shit like this, he also censored remarks critical of Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Twitter in deference to autocratic rule in Turkey.

"Pedo guy" lawsuit
Musk's most ghastly batshit-insanity is the accusation of a child-rescuing hero of being a pedophile. While several young soccer players were stuck in a cave, Musk flew to Thailand and tried to offer help however he could. Regardless of whether or not the suggestion that his mission to help out was nothing but a PR stunt, it seemed his help was rather useless and was getting in the way. A semi-professional spelunker, Vern Unsworth helped bring the trapped children to safety. He was critical of some of Musk's efforts to help including criticism of the feasibility of Musk's proposed amazing-cave-submarine-child-rescue-awesome-mobile. Unsworth risked his life to reach the boys, comfort the scared children and rescue them. As thanks for this he was accused of being a pedophile by Musk. Musk's petty hissy-fit in the form of a vague accusation of pedophilia didn't go away even after Musk deleted the tweet and gave a half-hearted retraction. A week later, Musk sprayed a full out pedophile on social media...twice.

In September 2018, Unsworth filed suit for defamation, with Musk somehow winning, despite none of his accusations having a shred of truth to them — the Private Investigator hired by Musk having scammed him. The court was mostly hung up if Musk was just casually slinging the term or actually trying to defame Unsworth.

During the trial, he essentially defended his right to be a Twitter troll.

Donald Trump
Musk was very critical of Donald Trump until Trump became President. Musk then changed his mind and joined Trump initiatives including a council of business advisors and a project to promote manufacturing in the US. Musk's attacks on the media seemed in accord with Trump's complaints about fake news and were supported by Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. He also supported Trump's campaign to shift global tariffs on car imports and exports to be more favorable to American car exports. He left Trump's presidential council in June of 2017, citing Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement.