Elon Musk

This is the face of a man who can wipe out your retirement fund with a dumb tweet.

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“”Elon won't go home. I can't get rid of him. Until I don't like him.

—Donald Trump

“”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?

—Will Oremus

Elon "Elmo" Reeve "Ted Faro" "Chief Twit" "Space Karen" "Elongated Muskrat" "The Boer" Musk (1971–) is a former illegal immigrant and current centibillionaire who is one of the richest people in the world — sometimes the richest, depending on swings in Tesla's stock price. Musk has expressed a wide range of erratically-shifting and sometimes contradictory beliefs. To name a few among these: he has endorsed antisemitic and/or racist ideas, conspiracy theories, and occasional pro-Russia/China positions (or even direct actions), but has often taken the exact opposite position before on any given issue. Despite this, he has also fostered something of a cult of personality. But he is best known for his S3XY electric vehicles and for his "plans" to colonise Mars. By 2023, Musk had been recognized by the Guinness World Records for the "largest loss of personal fortune in history" (US$182 billion loss) due to a crash in Tesla's stock price.

He is also the embodiment of the hi-tech messiah complex of the 21^st century with a detailed history of terrible Twitter shitposting. To give one shining example of his typical eccentric flair: he once brought a two-hundred year old musket to a video-game studio to demand a cameo in their cyberpunk game.

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. Musk, however, also oversees questionable labor practices and has a strange view of modern capitalism.

Musk is also notable for his significant political shifts over the years. In 2012, Musk described himself as a moderate with middle of the road political views. At that time, his politics were far secondary to his futurism persona — his social media was all about his companies' progress, with the goal of such companies being lofty concepts such as minimizing climate change and colonizing Mars. By 2024, fueled by private life drama (including Musk's inability to handle his transgender daughter's transition), Musk had largely abandoned this persona in favor of reactionary stances, becoming a Trumpism-aligned persona obsessed with the supposed dangers of "woke". His Twitter feed increasingly looked less like a promotion for his Tesla and SpaceX companies and more like the feed of a far-right activist. Not only did he financially support Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, he personally stood on stage with Trump at a campaign rally and spread Big Lie oriented election conspiracy theories on his Twitter account. In August 2024 he hosted a softball interview with Trump on Twitter. There, Musk (skirting dangerously close to climate change denialism) hand-waved away the threat climate change posed to the world — the very same threats that were a significant motivational factor for Musk starting Tesla.

Musk has found endless controversy (and legal problems) due to bizarre and even despicable tweets ranging from COVID-19 misinformation and anti-lockdown stubbornness, to market-destabilizing comments, to even labeling a Tham Luang cave rescue diver as a pedophile. Other bizarre tweets include denying that a neo-Nazi was in fact, a neo-Nazi, and creepily declaring that he wanted to impregnate megastar musician Taylor Swift after she endorsed Kamala Harris for the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

In 2023, Musk deliberately shut down Starlink access to the Ukrainian military as they were carrying out a military operation in Crimea. Musk also drew the ire of the Taiwanese government and the praise of the Chinese Communist Party when he publicly supported the PRC claim over Taiwan.

Musk has shown some willingness to admit when he's wrong, though this is rather rare (and may be PR). Two examples include his regret for promoting a conspiracy theory about Nancy Pelosi's husband, and regret for cheering on a particularly egregious antisemitic post.

Youth and skeletons in the family closet

Joshua N. Haldeman in 1945 as SCP candidate for the Canadian Parliament

“”Accelerating Starship development to build the Martian Technocracy

—Musk

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.

Musk's maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman (a.k.a., "10450-1", as per Technocracy's edict), was a chiropractor, a member of the Technocracy movement and of the Social Credit Party of Canada (SCP) In 1942, Technocracy was described as propagandistic and an incipient fascist group. Technocracy and the SCP held antisemitic conspiracist views, as did Haldeman. "An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, antisemitic, and anti-democratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades…" Haldeman moved to apartheid South Africa because he believed that country led "'White Christian Civilization' in its fight against the 'International Conspiracy' of Jewish bankers and the 'hordes of Coloured people' they controlleda."

Business ventures

Rendering of the SpaceX Dragon 2 reusable space capsule. The Dragon 2 comes in two variants, one for human spaceflight and the other for cargo.

“”Knowing what I know about the man, my conclusion is that it’s incredible that such a mediocre figure can amass such wealth, but it was ever thus.

—Darryl Cunningham, a Musk biographer

• Zip2: started in 1995 (apparently "with investments from The New York Times Company, Knight-Ridder, MDV, Softbank and the Hearst Corporation"), a company that produced city guides for newspapers, sold in 1999 to Compaq for $307 million.
• 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 most powerful launch vehicle currently in use and testing it by putting an advertisement in Earth orbit (a Tesla). The above-mentioned Peter Thiel (who is said to have a "love-hate relationship" with Musk) was "instrumental in SpaceX's success", investing some $20 million into it via his Founders Fund in 2008, when the company was "on the rocks". 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, the Starship rocket 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! The subsequent launch was also deemed a 'success' by SpaceX and finally the fifth test launch in 2024 saw the recovery of the Super Heavy booster, that landed in the launch tower.
• 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 idiotic and impossible 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.")
• 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.

The Boring Company: Burn it all down

Yawn!

The Boring Company (TBC), 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.

As of 2023, 5 TBC projects were cancelled or moribund (Baltimore-Washington Loop, Chicago, Illinois, Los Angeles and San Jose, California, and Sydney area, Australia). Only one short demonstration tunnel had been completed (Las Vegas, Nevada). It almost immediately ran into issues as its Tesla vehicles encountered traffic jams—almost as if cars are not the solution to traffic.

In 2018, attempting to make Boring exciting again, Boring began manufacturing flamethrowers, selling 20,000 flamethrowers by subscription. At the time, California was experiencing its worst wildfire season up to that point, so Musk was seriously pissing off government officials and private citizens. Both UK and California government officials warned Musk that it was generally illegal to own flamethrowers in both jurisdictions.

Tesla Motors

Either the logo of the most valuable car manufacturer in history or the drawing of a uterus

Advanced driver assistance features

“”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.

—@dril

“”If the manufacturer isn’t going to take safety seriously, it is up to the federal government to make sure that they are standing up for others to ensure safety, safety does not seem to be the priority when it comes to Tesla.

—Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) explaining why Musk hates regulations

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 "eco-friendly" electric cars, which made the news for catching fire with toxic smoke and hard-to-extinguish flames. As it turns out though, while Teslas caught fire, they did so at a much lower rate than the cars relying on tiny controlled explosions of extremely flammable hydrocarbons. However, putting out lithium battery fires is far more difficult than putting out internal combustion car fires, sometimes requiring over 20,000 gallons of water. Tesla also makes cars that can drive themselves, but they seem to have a habit of crashing while doing so.

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. Strategic business misstep or pump-and-dump scheme? You decide.

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 "Official" Nintendo tweeting a picture of Mario 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 — dril (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

“”Go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear?

—Elon Musk's message to advertisers in late November 2023, after yet even more advertisers paused Twitter ads over a Musk antisemitic tweet.

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. According to his biography by Walter Isaacson, Musk was ridiculed for the exchange by his brother and privately regretted it. In January 2023, he apologized for it.

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. In 2024, a global survey revealed that over a quarter of advertisers plan to decrease their spending on the platform over the next year, citing extreme content and the risk to their brands.

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 Eli Lilly, which made a shitpost tweet on November 10 2022 that declared that "insulin is free now". 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" karoshi-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 "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 Netblocks, 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 Haraldur Ingi Þorleifsson, 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 muscular dystrophy. 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.)

Content moderation dictator

“”Please be super vocal if there is something dumb I'm doing or not doing. That would be greatly appreciated.

—Elon Musk to Jack Dorsey in April 2022 regarding Twitter acquisition

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 Elliot Page), Babylon Bee (suspended for transphobic tweets about Rachel Levine), 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 Anthony Fauci (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 Mastodon. 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. In April 2023, Musk's Twitter started blocking links to the blogging platform Substack, on the grounds that they were launching a Twitter-like service called Substack Notes. On April 19, 2023, Twitter suspended a reporter from Wired 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 CBS News 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, RTVE, 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 Xinhua); 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, 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. He did this again in Late October. In 2024, trying to post the word cisgender (an actual medical term) on Twitter/X now results in an automatic content warning ("This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and could be used in a harmful manner in violation of our rules.").

At the beginning of July 2023, Musk (fresh off of making headlines for immaturely challenging social media rival CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a UFC 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-DDoS the site. The changes also broke Twitter management tools like TweetDeck. 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, Bluesky, Spill, and even Truth Social.

Probably not entirely coincidentally, on Monday July 3 2023, Zuckerberg's new rival Twitter clone, Threads, 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 putting up with extremist pollution.

In December 2023 Elon Musk lost a court case related to California's content moderation policy. This is one case of Musk putting Twitter into two court cases, one with the state of California, and the other related to a Media Matters Lawsuit.

Sucking up to authoritarians

According to a report by the non-profit news organization Rest of the World in April 2023, since Musk took over Twitter, Twitter's compliance with government demands for censorship or surveillance rose to over 80%, from around 50%.

In late January, Musk continued to demonstrate how his "free speech absolutist" claim was bullshit (particularly perhaps when it came to appeasing authoritarian demands) when 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 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 Matt Yglesias, 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 Jimmy Wales, 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."

In August 2023, unsealed court documents revealed that in February that year, Twitter dragged its feet and fought back in providing data from Donald Trump's account to the government, in accordance with a search warrant related to an investigation into Trump's role in the 2021 U.S. coup attempt (an investigation that eventually led to an indictment). The repeated delays were such that Twitter eventually ended up earning a $350,000 contempt of court fine. Judge Beryl Howell specifically singled out Musk in a February 7 hearing, wondering if the foot-dragging was "because the new CEO wants to cozy up with the former president". Another federal prosecutor named Renato Mariotti noted that it was an unusual step for Twitter to hire "expensive lawyers to fight a lawful search warrant", and believed that Trump was getting special treatment from Musk.

In contrast to his capitulation towards "right-wing" populist government moderation requests, Musk was much more openly hostile in a case involving Brazil, which (not coincidentally) was led by the "left-wing" government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the time. In December 2022, supporters of the defeated president Jair Bolsonaro attempted to storm the headquarters of the Brazillian Federal Police. As part of the inquiries into the attacks, in January 2023, the Brazil Supreme Court asked social media platforms to hand over information and suspend accounts linked to any illegal activities relating to such. Musk expressed concern, but ultimately complied with the order on that date. However, on April 2024, Brazil Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes asked for some additional accounts to be blocked. In this case, Musk openly defied the Supreme Court's orders, removing Twitter's legal representative from Brazil in protest. As a legal representative is required by law in Brazil for any foreign country to operate, de Moraes gave Musk a deadline of August 29 2024 to comply with the court or else Twitter would be banned in Brazil. Predictably, Musk did nothing, so on that date, the ban was enacted — even using a VPN to attempt to bypass the ban and access Twitter would result in a fine. Aside from Brazil, Musk has been much more willing to apply his "free speech absolutism" motif and moan about "censorship" when it comes to moderation requests from Western democracies such as the EU and Australia. (Of course, his capitulations to "right-wing" authoritarians demonstrate that the "absolutism" part of Musk's motif is simply bullshit.)

The lie of free speech absolutism

“”"This guy blew up my life by saying I condone pedophilia, and then he turns around and does this."

—Yoel Roth

Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022, and two months later he suspended several journalists who had been critical of him on Twitter: Matt Binder (@mattbinder) of Mashable, Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) of The Washington Post, Steven L. Herman (@W7VOA) of Voice of America, Micah Lee (@micahflee) of The Intercept, Linette Lopez of Business Insider, Ryan Mac (@rmac18) of The New York Times, Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) of CNN, Keith Olbermann (@keitholbermann), Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) and Tony Webster (@webster). Ostensibly, the suspensions were because of use of private jet trackers, but such information is openly available on the web and the accounts were suspended without warning. It's a lesson in how to preserve "freeze peach" by silencing one's critics. Musk continued to throttle journalists but more subtly by downgrading Twitter posts that have external links (such as to full journalistic reports). Musk has even throttled posts with links to specific news outlets that he doesn't like, such as The New York Times.

In July 2023, Musk un-suspended the account of a QAnon influencer named Dominick McGee after some of the account's followers complained that the account had been suspended for its political messaging. In reality, McGee had been suspended for posting a partly-censored CSAM image of a toddler being tortured. This image was taken from one of the most notorious child abuse videos in the world, made by an Australian man named Peter Scully, who was convicted of child sexual abuse in the Philippines and sentenced to 129 years' imprisonment. Such material, even when partially censored, is considered child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and therefore illegal.

Musk has insisted that stopping the spread of CSAM on Twitter is one of his highest priorities. However, in June 2023, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center reported that Twitter had been letting through known CSAM material that should have been automatically detected by PhotoDNA, a widely used database of detected child exploitation images. According to Stanford Internet Observatory's chief technologist David Thiel, PhotoDNA appeared to be at least partially down for a period of time in 2023. Due to this, plus a lack of a rapid response to fix the issue (due to the trust and safety teams being gutted), "tons of known CSAM" flooded Twitter for a significant period before the issue was fixed.

Following the 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli retaliation in Gaza, an explosion of antisemitic posts on X/Twitter went unchecked. Musk, thinking that he could solve the problem, must have thought he could just go to Israel, meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu, make a statement ("We need to do everything possible to stop the hate."), and that would be the end of it. It would seem very unlikely given that Musk refuses to do anything about Twitter antisemitism since the Trust and Safety team at X likely remains eviscerated from the time it was dissolved in December 2022, and since Musk boosted the previously-thought-to-be-moribund Pizzagate conspiracy theory one day after meeting with Netanyahu.

Despite Musk's claims of free speech absolutism, he has consistently capitulated to right-wing authoritarians (India's Narendra Modi and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan) but not when it involves censoring far-right anti-democratic ideas or his own critics.

In September 2024, the account of journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended from Twitter for publishing the Trump campaign's internal evaluation of JD Vance that the mainstream media refused to publish.

In 2024, British graphic novelist Darryl Cunningham was unable to find a US or UK publisher for his book about Musk, Elon Musk: Investigation into a New Master of the World even though the French language edition had already been published (Elon Musk: Enquête sur un nouveau maître du monde) Delcourt had lawyers review every word and image in the book and had not used any information that had not already been published. It would seem to be a widespread act of self-censorship by English-language publishers on the possible threat of what would be extremely expensive legal action by Musk. There was justifiable fear by the publishers about a SLAPP suit from Musk if they published; in 2023, Musk had filed a defamation SLAPP suit against Media Matters for America with the presumed intent of crushing the organization.

The 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" and claiming that 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 2022 COVID-19 protests in China.

An analysis of Musk's replies and exchanges on his Twitter account by Le Monde, 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 toward criticisms coming from Democratic politicians, as well as making fun of the mainstream American media in general (the latter probably due to Musk's thin-skinned inability to handle criticism.)

A March 2023 BBC analysis of Twitter by Marianna Spring 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 directing 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 Dogecoin 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 Rolling Stone that "climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI". In October 2016, in response to a CNBC interview where the coal baron (and John Oliver arch-nemesis) Robert E. Murray 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 Paris Agreement.

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 Build Back Better Plan bill, due to what critics saw as irritation at other automobile companies getting more subsidies than Tesla. Likewise, right after Tesla was booted from S&P's "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 Linda Yaccarino, 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.

By March 2024, according to the market research firm Sensor Tower, the number of Twitter daily app users worldwide had declined 15% since November 2022 (when Musk took over), and had declined 23% in the United States specifically. In comparison, most social media apps were experiencing modest growth worldwide during that period, and (with the exception of TikTok) were flat or modestly down in the United States. Fake news was still very prevalent on the Twitter platform, so much so that in December 2023, Twitter became the first tech company to face a formal investigation within the European Union under the Digital Services Act. Hate speech, including noxious AI generated images straight from 4chan's /pol/, also thrived on the platform; rather than address the hate speech, Musk responded by suing watchdog organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League. With major advertisers still staying clear of Twitter's toxic environment, Twitter also was noteworthy for being infested with tons of shady advertisements, including cryptocurrency scams, "dropshipping" scams, and health care scams and misinformation.

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

Compensating much?

“” 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's brother, Kimbal, making the understatement of the year

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.

By July 2023, Musk's position on COVID-19 was considerably more cranky and in line with the anti-vaccination movement, in line with his general tilt towards conspiracy theories. After basketball player Bronny James collapsed of cardiac arrest, Musk, without any evidence, tried to insinuate that the COVID-19 vaccine may have caused this, stating that "Myocarditis is a known side-effect" of the vaccine. When Twitter users helpfully added a fact-check to this post that actually the risk of myocarditis is significantly higher from a COVID-19 infection than the vaccine, this fact check was removed. Myocarditis also is not the most common cause of cardiac arrest in young athletes.

Tesla engineer: "You mean, program the robot? Or design that tool?"

Musk: "Did you fucking do this?"

Engineer: "I’m not sure what you’re referring to? (apologetically)

Musk: "You’re a fucking idiot! Get the fuck out and don’t come back!"

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.

Musk has thought of himself as a utilitarian. He once stated that the "Goal of government should be to maximize the happiness of the people." He has promoted the effective altruism movement, and he used Roko's basilisk as a pickup line on someone who was his partner.

There is apparently an idea even in his own family that people in general loathe Musk. His brother Kimbal clearly knows it and understands why. Following Musk's appointment to be co-head with Vivek Ramaswamy of the two-headed DOGE, Musk own mother, Maye, felt compelled to defend him on Fox News, saying:

“”I don’t like the word ‘wealthy’ or ‘billionaire’ or things like that because I think it’s degrading! I think he’s the genius of the world, and people are loving him for that! … They love him because of what he does, and they respect him. And I’m very proud of him.

At least calling Musk a wealthy billionaire is a statement of fact.

Musk's addictive personality

Despite multiple studies showing that excessive work hours leads to less productivity overall, Musk self-promotes himself as a workaholic who is obsessed with working extremely long hours, and frequently expects his employees to do the same. Curiously, in spite of his self-styled "workaholic" image, Musk also manages to allocate excessively long hours posting to Twitter. It is not unknown for Musk to go on tweeting binges for multiple hours on end, even exceeding 24 hour spans on occasion. In one alleged report, venture capitalist and Tesla board member Antonio Gracias once took Elon's iPhone and locked it in a hotel safe in order to prevent Musk from engaging in an ill-advised late night tweeting binge. Musk later got hotel security to open the safe at 3AM just so that he could start tweeting again.

In early 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported an additional allegation that could explain some of Musk's erratic behavior in the 2020s: Musk was a frequent recreational drug user, with alleged drugs used including LSD, cocaine, MDMA, and ketamine. Musk's propensity to take drugs was reportedly to the point where business associates and board members were worried that it would affect his career. In late 2022, Larry Ellison allegedly went so far as to urge Musk to travel to his private Hawaiian island for a period of time in order to pause his work and "dry out" from drugs.

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 except for one employee; this had been its only office in the entire continent of Africa. The employees were not mentioned by name and were not offered severance pay, thus they were being treated like objects and not like people.

In a rare ray of humanity behind Musk's wall of misanthropy, Tesla attempted to fully automate the production of Tesla Model 3 in 2018, thus getting rid of those pesky workers once and for all. It turned out to be a disaster with employees having to work overtime to fix the mess that the robots made. It was so bad that it was first known time that Musk admitted to ever being wrong. Musk even said, "Humans are underrated.", which means that Musk underrates humans.

Self-severing philanthropy

See the main article on this topic: Charity

“”Musk clearly has utter disregard for conventions around charitable giving, and he has all the altruism of a turnip. Why should he pay professional staff to run the foundation correctly – and even to create some charitable impact – since none of it really matters to him?

—Alan Cantor

Musk likes to project an image of philanthropy, notably claiming that his for-profit companies are themselves philanthrophic,^{Do You Believe That?} but half of all his charitable giving can be attributed to self-interest. Examples are:

• Donating money to Cameron County and the city of Brownsville where SpaceX is headquarters, and doing so less than two hours after his SpaceX rocket exploded over the county. Some of the money that went to the city eventually went to business revitalization, that included a bar and upscale restaurants. Musk was effectively trying to entice employees to move to Brownsville, whose downtown had been described as dusty.
• Failure of his Musk Foundation to give away the required minimum amount each year.
• He founded a non-profit, gated school, Ad Astra, initially with only 14 students, all of whom are either his or those of SpaceX executives. After moving to Texas, half of the 50 students were related to SpaceX employees.
• Donations to the semi-non-profit OpenAI, which has its own sociopathic end-product of ChatGPT.
• Under or unfulfilled promises of donations, and lack of focus (guided by tweets) for those donations that do not involve self-interest.
• Donations to rural schools through the UN in Rwanda and Kazakhstan to help them gain internet access… through Musk's Starlink.
• Donating money to a charity to help a SpaceX customer and fellow-billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who didn't want to fork-up the money himself.
• One of Musk's major donations, which went to his Musk Foundation, saved him $2 billion in taxes.

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Tweets

Musk in 2012, right before he told his friend not to come to school the next day.^{[citation NOT needed]}

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.

After taking over Twitter, Musk's tweets took a huge turn for the worse. Increasingly, Musk started directly promoting conspiracy theories on his feed (such as all but endorsing the Great Replacement Theory in late 2023) As CEO of Twitter, Musk went out of the way to amplify the voices of noxious trolls like the conspiracy nutjob Alex Jones or the manosphere grifter Andrew Tate. Musk simultaneously used his "free speech absolutism" to block (or even sue) organizations and individuals that were critical of him.

Musk's behavior on Twitter after he bought it was so extreme, it actually effected the reputation of the businesses he ran. In 2024, market intelligence firm Caliber reported that Tesla's "consideration" score in the United States (eg whether people would consider buying a Tesla car) fell from 70% in November 2021 to a low of 31% in February 2024, a decline that Caliber attributed in large part due to Musk's polarizing persona.

"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, bravely taking the controversial view that he likes good things, not bad things

Taylor Harris: What would you proclaim yourself as? Anything specifically?

Musk: A socialist

Musk: Marx was a capitalist. He even wrote a book about it.

Musk: And I don’t trust that Engels guy. He could have made up most of 2nd & 3rd volumes. Nobody actually knows.

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. And it's simply asinine to claim Marx was a capitalist simply because he wrote a book titled Capital. Was Hitler a strugglist, given the title of his own book?

Unions

See the main article on this topic: Trade union

Musk: If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks [a leftist writer]

Cory Doctorow: Iain Banks was an ardent trade unionist, @Elonmusk

Musk: Iain certainly wasn’t pro-union in the Culture books. At all. And wouldn’t be in the case of Tesla. Banks was about freedom through & through. Maybe for a single buyer (monopsony) vs single seller (monopoly), I would be too, but that’s a special case.

Doctorow: Banks consistently endorsed the freedom of workers to form collective bargaining units. The existence of a thought experiments in which this was obviated by eg FTL [faster-than light travel] is by no means an indication that a marginal improvement in EV tech would have turned him into a strikebreaker

Musk: I endorse freedom to form a union too, as well as freedom not to do so if they feel Tesla is a good company. UAW has major conflicts of interest & failed our car plant already when they abandoned us in 2010. Tesla can only hire 5% of applicants, so must be doing something right.

David Slack: Unions don’t exist only at “bad” companies, Mr. Musk. They exist to provide workers with a voice to negotiate with management, insuring that conditions do not become intolerable or unsafe, that good companies do not become bad ones. Good companies should welcome unions.

Musk: You think all companies are bad and all unions good? That’s a very bigoted position.

Typical DARVO strawman tactic, taking someone's statement that unions help keep companies from drifting into becoming bad ones, and twisting it to claim they're saying all companies are bad.

In 2023, Musk stated: "I disagree with the idea of unions … I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company."

In a 2018 post to Twitter, Musk threatened to pull the stock options of any workers who unionized at Tesla.

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:

"Boring bonehead questions are not cool. Next," ... "We're going to go to YouTube. Sorry, these questions are so dry. They're killing me."

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.

Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.

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".

Tesla stock price is too high imo

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.

Tesla claims in its annual reports to shareholders that it's ethical and that it does "not knowingly accept products or services from suppliers that include forced labor or human trafficking in any form." However, some materials that go into Teslas come from Xinjiang, China, where forced labor is rampant, and where there is a ban on imports of parts into the US (due to the Uyghur genocide). It would seem to be either willful ignorance or just plain hypocrisy.

Bigotry

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.

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2020

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 The Eternal Jew 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 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 name to Vivian Jenna Wilson. In response, Musk blamed "full-on communism" in universities, showing the typical right-wing ignorance of what communism actually is.

In April 2023, as if to demonstrate why his own child would want to distance themselves from him, 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 the Q (either "Queer" or "Questioning") is part of the LGB; in fact it encompasses all three of those. Further, Musk himself doesn't proclaim any sort of non-heterosexual identity and thus has little grounds to decide on such topics.

In July 2024, during an interview with Jordan Peterson, Musk admitted that part of his motivation for his turn towards reactionary politics is due to his estrangement from Vivian. Musk claimed that Vivian (who, in the interview, he deadnamed once again) was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" and claimed that he was "tricked" into agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures such as puberty blockers (which he falsely claimed were a "sterilization drug"). Vivian responded by slamming Musk as a largely absent father who berated her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressured her to appear more masculine. Vivian also slammed Musk's characteristics of gender affirming care, stating that they were lifesaving for her and other people with severe gender dysphobia, and that the requirements to be approved for taking puberty blockers as a minor were far more onerous than Musk characterized. A few weeks later, Vivian slammed a depiction of her in a 2023 biography / hagiography of Musk, claiming that the biography was "genuinely defamatory" and that she "was treated as a VILLAIN BACKSTORY-ORIGIN" in order "to get clicks" from reactionaries addicted to "culture war bullshit".

Antisemitism

See the main article on this topic: 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 X-Men villain and Holocaust survivor Magneto ("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.

In mid-November 2023, Musk agreed with a post from a Twitter account (with a long history of posting extremist, conspiracy tinged, bigoted content) that accused Jewish communities of pushing "dialectical hatred against whites" and spoke of an antisemitic, Great Replacement / white genocide-like conspiracy theory that falsely asserted that Jews want to use "hordes of minorities" to displace the white population. Musk's reply to this post was "You have said the actual truth." This Tweet coincided with a report from Media Matters for America (MMFA) detailing how advertisements for major brands were being placed within Twitter threads that praised Adolf Hitler and Nazis. Musk's antisemitic tweet combined with the MMFA report resulted in backlash from both the White House and the EU, alarm from Jewish leaders and organizations, and departures of yet even more advertisers from the Twitter platform. This was not the first time that brands suspended advertising on Twitter due to ads appearing next to pro-Nazi content; a similar incident occurred in mid-August 2023.

White genocide

See the main article on this topic: White genocide

After decades of mostly ignoring his natal country, Musk claimed that "They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa" in 2023, based on a single political rally by the country's third-largest party, the Marxist-Leninist Economic Freedom Fighters, in which an apartheid-era song was sung that included the lyrics "shoot to kill", "kill the Boer" and "kill the farmer".

In November 2023, shortly after agreeing with an antisemitic oriented post that flirted with white genocide conspiracy theories, Musk replied to an exchange between the alt-right racist pundit Jack Posobiec and the far-right Dutch FvD politician/pundit Eva Vlaardingerbroek. In the thread, Posobiec complained that "white people are the only ones who are supposed to hate their own race in order to be considered good people... and white culture is the only one where hatred of it is considered a virtue". Vlaardingerbroek agreed with the sentiment, insisting that "everyone is allowed to be proud of their race, except for white people, because we’ve been brainwashed into believing that our history was somehow 'worse' than that of other races." These statements, of course, were obvious racist loaded language based on a perceived persecution complex against whites, similar to such alt-right memes as It's Okay To Be White. Of course, Musk completely agreed with the statements, replying that it was "time for this nonsense to end and shame ANYONE who perpetuates these lies!"

Supporting far-right hooligans

Musk and his Twitter platform played a significant role in the 2024 United Kingdom riots. The genesis of these riots, which began in late July 2024, occurred when false rumors spread online that the suspect of a deadly mass stabbing event was a Muslim immigrant. These claims were amplified by noxious far-right personalities such as Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox, and Tommy Robinson (the later who was reinstated on Twitter in November 2023 after previously being banned for breaching Twitter's "hateful conduct" policy). Musk did his best to amplify the riots himself: he engaged with Robinson, tweeted exaggerated bullshit such as "civil war is inevitable", and bizarrely compared UK authorities pursuing the hooligan perpetrators to "woke Stasi". Twitter was identified as one of the primary outlets that spread the misinformation that fueled the riots. Critics directly linked actions Musk took as CEO of Twitter to the riots, such as disbanding the trust and safety team and setting up a "blue check" system that allowed nefarious actors to boost disinformation propaganda.

In reality, the riots were hardly at the level of a "civil war" — they represented only a tiny minority of the UK population. The rioting was way out of step with UK public opinion. Even Reform UK voters reacted negatively to the hooliganism. The riots also amplified concerns that the far-right was now a significant threat to British society. A poll taken by YouGov after the riots showed that 47 percent of Britons professed this belief. This percentage, up 15 points since the previous poll in February 2024, was nearly as high as the percentage of Britons identifying Islamic extremism as a threat. By August 2024, many of the far-right hooligan gatherings were countered by much larger groups of anti-racism protesters that defended hooligan targets such as immigration centers.

Despite Musk being seriously out of step with Briton public opinion, Musk feuded with prime minister Keir Starmer after he called Musk out on his bullshit "civil war" tweet. Backed by alt-right memes shared by far-right agitators such as Andy Ngo, Musk reacted to the news of police arresting violent rioters by bizarrely comparing Britain to the Soviet Union. Musk also applied Soviet Union-style whataboutism to the government's decision to provide extra protection for mosques during the riots, wailing "shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on all communities?" at a time when such attacks were obviously not occurring. Musk even shared (and quickly deleted) a fake news image that promoted a conspiracy theory about the UK building "detainment camps" on the Falkland Islands for rioters.

Predictably, Musk's support for hooliganism corresponded with a significant British increase in interest in Twitter competitors Bluesky and Threads, including from Labour MPs who were seeking refuge from Twitter's increasing far-right toxicity. In September 2024, data from Similarweb showed that active daily users of Twitter in the UK dropped from 8 million in 2023 to only 5.6 million at that time, with more than a third of that fall happening after the hooligan riots.

"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 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.

Doxing federal employees

In the middle of November 2024, Musk reposted two tweets that contained the names of federal government employees that he wants gone. This has terrified government workers, who fear not only losing their jobs, but being the targets of harassment and even violence by the Chief Twit and his horde of rabid fans.

Natalism

If we are taking Musk at his word, one of his central concerns is that of natalism, which he said was "the biggest issue in 20 years" as of 2019 (and he has since continued signaling his interest, often via Tweet). He believes that people should be having more children, and is himself the father of roughly a dozen. He sometimes expresses his natalist beliefs in totalizing and dramatic ways. For example, in a reply to Eva Vlaardingerbroek, he once claimed that a "major part of the fall of Rome was low birth rates". After which, he actually went to Rome to tell people to have more children. Musk claims that "population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming". He has also insinuated that low birth rates are "a massive genocide of the next generation of humans", a result which he attributed "instrumentally" to overpopulation alarmist Paul R. Ehrlich. Despite his repulsion towards Ehrlich, Musk has something in common with him: draconian disregard for personal bodily autonomy. While Ehrlich advocated mass sterilization, Musk has advocated stripping voting rights from childless people.

There is perhaps more under the surface here. Musk is more especially concerned that people with high IQ scores aren't having enough children. (He is himself "confident" in his own intelligence, and expresses a fear that the future will look like Idiocracy.) His concern, then, perhaps isn't quite that too few children are coming into the world, but that too few children with high-IQ parents are. This view of his has sometimes been derided as "hipster eugenics", or "low-key eugenic", and it isn't hard to see why.

Why Musk is so interested is debatable. He has indicated various reasons, and some of them appear dubious, like his proclamation that Mars will need colonists. WIRED speculated that it could be a cold, capitalist calculation about labor supply: more children, more workers. That would perhaps explain why Jeff Bezos, the late Shinzō Abe, and the villains from They Live are mostly in agreement with Musk, at least. Assuming Musk's adherence to this sort of eugenic natalism is genuine, it may offer a certain explanatory power for some other positions he has taken, which could in fact be outgrowths from this central belief. For instance, his fear of a white genocide scenario may (somewhat speculatively, but his engagements with the account @eyeslasho appear to support this) stem from racialist anxiety towards reproduction by non-white, non-Asian people. His natalism also appears to have informed his views on birth control and abortion.

Musk's references to transgender medicine as "sterilization", beyond their inaccuracy (at least for nonsurgical interventions such as hormone replacement), could possibly be another outgrowth from his eugenic natalism. Grimes suggested it was indeed a factor (alongside a perceived dislike of "woke culture"), and had a half-decent response invoking the existence of modern fertility interventions. (For example: clomifene has been successfully used to boost fertility in both transgender men and women, and "extended sperm search and microfreeze" is reportedly effective for the latter.)

In reality, many of the root causes of the low global birth rates are actually a byproduct of human progress — notably advances in education and health, more freedoms and opportunities in society, and equal rights for women (along with some additional negative external factors like ballooning costs for raising kids). However, ironically for Musk (who significantly promotes "hardcore" working hours in his businesses), excessively long working hours have been additionally identified as a significant factor in reducing birth rates in studies of South Korea, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. One Japanese company (Itochu) in 2010 banned late-night working and restricted overtime in an attempt to boost productivity. Not only was productivity successfully boosted, so was the internal birth rate within the company. Poor national policies that favor corporate work over the health and support of families (as in the United States, a country which lacks federally mandated paid paternity leave, universal health care, and universal child care) may also contribute to low birth rates. A study by the Economic Innovation Group suggests that more flexible work options, such as the remote work that many companies were forced to implement during the COVID-19 pandemic, may have some limited positive effects on fertility. (Unsurprisingly, Musk detests remote work, calling it "morally wrong" in a May 2023 interview with CNBC.)

Donald Trump

Cheap-ass billionaires Trump and Musk can't even pay for their own damn billboards

“”Merry Christmas to alll...none of which are as the THUGS we have inside our Country who, with their... Green New Scam... All Electric Car Lunacy, and so much more, are looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL... MERRY CHRISTMAS!

—Donald Trump bringing some holiday cheer on Christmas 2023, and sharing his frank opinion about Musk's core EV business.

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.

Musk claimed to have voted for Barack Obama twice (2008, 2012), Hillary Clinton (2016), and Joe Biden (2020), before supporting fascism from 2022 onward, starting with DeSantis continuing with Trump and Alternative for Germany in 2024. One is reminded of the villainous surgeon in the horror film Get Out trying to lure his victim into a feeling of trust, "By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term, if I could. Best President in my lifetime, hands down." As evidence of Musk's saying things that are politically expedient that he clearly does not believe in, in 2023 he pledged to the Chinese government that his companies would adhere to "'core socialist values", so that he could avert an EV price war with China.

By 2024, Musk had significantly shifted his politics towards Trumpism. As a result, after an assassination attempt on Trump, Musk quickly endorsed him and even said that he planned to support Trump's presidential bid with an undisclosed sum of cash. Musk even began appearing on stage with Trump at campaign rallies, and set up a PAC to directly campaign for Trump. During one rally, Musk enthusiastically jumped around Trump like an idiot.

Musk's turn towards Trumpism naturally included Other-demonizing conspiracy theories. During the 2024 election campaign, Musk claimed on his Twitter account, without evidence, that Democrats were trying to fill the country with undocumented immigrants, such as himself, who would subsequently reward them with permanent power. Ironically given Trump's authoritarianism and the authoritarianism of adjacent entities such as Project 2025, Musk also repeatedly warned that the 2024 race could be the last free election in America should Kamala Harris win.

See also

• Nikola Tesla – from whom his company’s name came. Although ironically, Musk identifies more with Tesla's nemesis, Thomas Edison, than with Tesla himself.
• Henry Ford – The past version of Elon Musk, with all of the anti-semitism and racism as well!
• Engineers and woo – discussion of a highly-adjacent sort of arrogance

External links

• Elon Musk Today — Bullshit Musk has said