The Musk acquisition has been more than a little crazy for a platform where many users’ biggest obsession is the site itself. Twitter’s text box still asks every user with “What’s happening?” What invariably happens is that they look at Twitter. This simple fact explains perhaps 99 percent of the bitterness there, which is rarely about events in the outside world and often about the content of other tweets. Pretty much everyone who uses Twitter feels like they’re being hurt by it in some way, but they can’t stop watching. And one of the perverse facts about this is that the more power and followers one accumulates, the more one runs the risk of being pushed forward as an example of everything that is wrong in the world – no more than the winner of the whole game. of global capitalism. No wonder Musk thinks there’s still value to unlock: he loves the site, even though his experience with it is most likely terrible.
And because Musk is the richest person in the world, it’s easy for many to believe that the deal isn’t about a desire to revamp and revamp “the digital town square,” but something more nefarious or dumber. Some — including the second richest man in the worldJeff Bezos – have speculated that Tesla’s exposure to the Chinese market will indeed make it Lake subject to censorship under Musk’s ownership. Others were concerned that he now owns journalists’ DMs; some find that hilarious. Some fear he will bring back former President Donald Trump, another billionaire power user of the platform; many others find that idea exciting. He’s said he wants to keep bot accounts in check, which probably seems like a bigger problem for you if you have 85.4 million followers and tweet about crypto and stock quotes and the numbers 420 and 69. On Monday, people continued to post unflattering photos of him. — from his PayPal days, or standing next to Ghislaine Maxwell — joking that it’s the last day they get away with it.
And this is what is so disturbing about its acquisition: the strong sense that it is – even at its most anodyne – an act of vanity, a means of enhancing a user’s personal experience of the agora. And there’s something about it. Musk is dripping with desperation to be considered funny, an ailment money can’t solve and perhaps his most recognizable trait. His outing on “Saturday Night Live” was verging on painful to watch, even by today’s “SNL” standards – especially his monologue, which was full of fascinating nice-to-me defense mechanisms: an announcement that he was the first host with Asperger’s syndrome; a performance by his mother, who hugged him and told him she loved him; and a statement of its vision for the future: “I believe in a renewable energy future; I believe that humanity must become a multiplanetary, space-faring civilization.”
After that part, he paused: “Those look like exciting goals, don’t they? Now I think it would be okay if I had posted that on Twitter. But I also write things like ’69 days after 4/20 again haha’ ” — a real post dated June 28, 2020, that was indeed 69 days after April 20 — “I don’t know, I thought it was funny. That’s why I wrote ‘haha’ at the end. Look, I know I sometimes say or post weird things, but that’s how my brain works. To everyone I’ve offended, I just want to say: I’ve reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I’d be a laid-back, normal guy too?’
Never before has the Twitter user mentality been summed up so beautifully: I know you may not like my jokes, but you have to understand that I am really cool. The capital markets have richly rewarded Musk for this; Twitter, the home of the guillotine meme, doesn’t have that — or at least not uniformly. But because of the former, any frustration Musk has with the latter may be the closest thing to a digital city square. It’s not clear that there’s anything to grieve about this changing of the guard, except maybe it could happen at all.
