King Elon is naked without his spacesuit

IF you thought it was a tense affair to go buy a second-hand car cash from an unknown skollie in Kuils River, you clearly haven't seen a paranoid space entrepreneur and his army of engineers and lawyers take over a social media platform during a Halloween party in San Fran before the $44 billion purchase price has been transferred.

It's chaos. Chaos. And it reflects pretty much everything else in the complex living and working world of a figure like Elon Musk. The more you read about these types of people, the more you realise that the genius we attribute to people like Musk doesn't necessarily encompass their clever ideas.

Their genius lies in having the superpower to consistently enforce their ideas within the chaos, and the superpower can be anything from charisma and persuasiveness, capacity for intimidation, psychopathic disorders, hypnotic personal style, huge amounts of bribe money and so on. Merit plays a role, but not nearly as much as people like Musk would have you believe. An ego that convinces one that one's needs take priority over any conventions or rules that apply to other people is a good starting point.

It's clear that Musk sees himself as a figure to whom the conventions of centuries of business transactions and manners simply don't apply. And sometimes old-fashioned brutality is part of the package, as the paranoid aspects of his personality become apparent.

On the day of the actual transfer (when the $44 billion landed in Twitter's accounts piece by piece), four top executives of Twitter were summarily fired by Musk: Parag Agrawal (CEO), Ned Segal (CFO), Vijay Gadde (legal chief) and Sean Edgett (legal counsel). By this time, Agrawal, Segal and Gadde already knew enough about Musk and his small band of lawyers to remove themselves from the building. However, Edgett, a legal counsel with 10 years of good service at Twitter, had previously done nothing to put his head on the block. Yet before he knew it, security guards who until minutes before were subordinate to him, led him out of the building like a criminal past all his colleagues in Halloween costumes.

Even before the transaction was completed, Musk focused on the officials involved in the legal processes to force him to buy Twitter, after he tried to withdraw from the transaction several times following his initial offer. It was a personal action for him, like so many of the things he does. He also made sure that as many of these officials as possible were fired “for cause", in other words for misconduct, and thus would receive no severance packages, despite decades of faithful service.

The signs were there early already

The lead-up, course, and aftermath of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, now X, are captured in incredible detail by two New York Times reporters, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, in the brand-new book: Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

The story could certainly have been told more concisely and readably, but the inclusion of the mass of detail truly gives readers the chance to come to their own interpretation. This is history-writing captured moments after the events occurred.

It is also sensational, without the reporters having to search for sensation at all. The distrust, hostility, childishness, theatrics and gossip campaigns are things you can't believe until you ... well, until you've at least read a good account of it.

The strategic and financial lead-up to the hostile takeover is certainly not the most exciting part of the story, but the importance of it again lies in how seemingly chaotic it happened and how much of it left people scratching their heads.

What can be valuable from such a historical account is realising that you could have trusted your instincts as a journalist more. Of course, one must always be sceptical and careful about drawing conclusions without sufficient facts, but more often than not, the principle of Occam's razor is the one you should use – the most obvious explanation for an event is probably the right one.

Many of the management blunders that Musk made shortly after the transaction – such as scaring off advertisers with talk that moderation of content would be scaled back to make room for a kind of fundamentalist freedom of speech, and the paid Blue Tick subscriber idea – very clearly looked like the wrong decisions, even for someone with only a few years of experience in online publishing. But one tended to assume he knew what he was doing.

We’re all for freedom of speech

Yes, there is a case to be made, as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had been for years, for building a successful and independent social media network on public infrastructure (financed through taxes). But Twitter was already progressing in an extremely difficult advertising environment with several major advertisers and agencies. It was moderately profitable in some years – far behind Facebook, but at least profitable.

The great irony is that the kind of liberal social democrat who typically works at places like Twitter has just as much respect for freedom of speech as a right-wing libertarian like Musk, but after a decade and a half of operating social networks, it's become deeply established among them that absolute freedom of speech is a utopian fever dream. On any open forum, you'll eventually have to silence a few Hezbollah recruiters and a noisy racist or two. You might also get involved in a wrestling match with a sitting president orchestrating an invasion of parliament from your social media network. Such things happen!

The irony of Musk's first big idea to generate income, the Blue Tick, is that it ultimately had the opposite effect of what was intended. The Blue Tick was initially used to indicate that an account was authentic, like the Department of Home Affairs, or Bruce Springsteen, to counteract the impact of impersonators, which was a big problem.

But then Twitter put a price on it, and anyone could buy it to get a bouquet of privileges, like having your post appear more prominently and your comments rising higher in the hierarchies. But ultimately, Twitter didn't have the staff to verify each paid Blue Tick, and it became meaningless.

An even bigger irony was that Agrawal and a few associates were on the verge of introducing a radical self-moderation system on Twitter, similar to the one used on Wikipedia – one that had already been tested and proven to work. There was intense excitement about it, and people even believed it could be the solution to all problems with moderation on social networks. It would have even worked to temper the generally negative and offensive vibe of Twitter, as this bad spirit was a stumbling block for many users, advertisers, and managers.

However, Musk listened with half an ear and relegated the idea to the rubbish bin without much ceremony.

It’s the incompetence that catches

I followed Musk's attempt to buy Twitter in reasonable detail in the media. I was aware of the first round of high-profile layoffs, followed by a second round of mass layoffs, which reduced the company's staff by roughly half.

What one learns from this report about Musk's lead-up to the Twitter purchase confirms that it proceeded even more amateurishly than what filtered through in the media. The amount of $44 billion that was offered was based on very few facts about what was going on in the company. It was just this side of a wild guess – more or less the equivalent of a quick calculation on the back of a thirty-pack of Rothmans.

The astounding fact is that Musk and his team, as in the case of any business acquisition, had the chance to do due diligence, which would have given them access to all of Twitter's records. The accounting system, the subscriber system which contained key information about how big the “bot" problem was, the advertising records, traffic reports, etc. For a reason that's difficult to understand, Musk dismissed this, in a kind of arrogant self-assurance, or possibly just because he didn't trust the Twitter officials.

Also, when the offer comes in such cases with such large companies and amounts involved, there are a series of regulatory investigations and negotiations about details, about possible layoffs and severance packages, and hundreds of other matters, mostly handled by lawyers. This is done after the initial offer and before the transaction is fully completed. It can have a major impact on the price ultimately paid, and the existing transactions that the buyer inherits. It can take months, even years. Musk dismissed all of this. He wanted Twitter, and he wanted it NOW.

The executives and lawyers at Twitter were naturally not so keen to be sold – after all, it's their baby that they tried to raise – but this decision by Musk made them jump up and down in excitement. It made most of them instantly rich, a few even billionaires, without unnecessary complications.

This is how you speak to Elon

In the companies controlled by Musk, a kind of method has independently developed for dealing with him. The first rule is that you can only compliment Musk – any form of criticism is out of the question. If the criticism is related to management decisions he’s made, the chances are high that you’ll be escorted out of the building by security in the coming days.

The book dedicates chapter after chapter to this pattern. Even managers who believed they had earned his ear after years of working for him suffered the same fate. The only way you might get him to take criticism seriously is if you mix it in with multiple compliments, and only when you're alone with him in a room. And even then, success is not guaranteed.

One absurd story after another is told about Elon’s ego wreaking havoc on people’s lives. Initially, he was apparently convinced there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of phantom employees collecting salaries at Twitter. He instructed the senior accountant, Robert Kaiden, to count the actual employees worldwide as against the contracts in the system. A thorough audit, conducted within days under Musk’s orders, didn’t reveal a single phantom employee. Not one. Kaiden made the mistake of announcing the audit’s results on the internal network, and for that, a furious Musk fired him on the spot.

When a junior artificial intelligence engineer, Yang Tang, tried to explain why fewer people were searching for Musk’s name in search engines, Musk fired him on the spot as well.

True colours?

From quite a few years ago Musk has shown signs that his political sentiments lean right of centre. On January 5, 2022, he tweeted his support for Republican Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House of representatives – the same McCarthy from California who supported Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020. He has even interacted with the account of @Catturd2, activist Jack Posobiec, who backed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

Under a “general amnesty" for suspended right-wing accounts, Musk even reinstated Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman who supports QAnon and spreads disinformation about Covid vaccines.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Musk views his contribution to free speech through X (formerly Twitter) at the same engineering level as his contribution to free speech through deploying satellites in space via Starlink. Musk himself valued X at $20 billion a year ago, less than half of what he paid for it. Since then, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have shown remarkable growth. Just a week ago, X was valued by banks at $13 billion.

Musk explains this by calling X an “inverse start-up" which, according to an e-mail to his staff, needed to shed all personnel and ideological baggage to grow again into a potential $250 billion company – despite having wrecked its advertising revenue.

Goodbye, advertisers

Advertisers almost immediately began pulling out – GM hit the brakes, IPG (Interpublic Group) stopped placing ads, and so did American Express, Coca-Cola, and Mattel. Musk believes a host of activist groups, such as Media Matters, America and the Anti-Defamation League are conspiring against him by running campaigns to convince advertisers to stop advertising on X. All complete nonsense.

He didn’t help matters by swearing at the CEO of his most loyal advertiser, Bob Iger from Disney, from a stage: “If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money – Go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey Bob! If you’re in the audience."

His Blue Tick programme twice failed dramatically, yet he still believes it can be a success. He no longer calls only the mainstream media propaganda but now labels all news as such. Recently, he removed all restrictions on Russian and Chinese state media on X. His statements are now veering into far-right conspiracy theory territory: “George Soros reminds me of Magneto. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity."

The death of X, Musk claims, is a conspiracy. As Conger and Mac put it: “Musk may have convinced himself that he bought Twitter to protect the global town square or to build the world’s most important app. But the truth is simpler. Whether he admits it or not, he bought it for himself, and for a brief moment, he owned the thing he desired most. He owned Twitter. And then it was gone."

* Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter is available from amazon.co.za in paperback for R420.

 ♦ VWB ♦

BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION: Go to the bottom of this page to share your opinion. We look forward to hearing from you.