You’ve heard this one before: Right as the internet calcifies into the bedrock of modern life, an ambitious billionaire enters the spotlight and ditches traditional comms strategies in favor of sharing every and any whim directly online. Specifically, on Twitter. The crowd, perhaps all too predictably, goes wild.
He says whatever he wants, whenever he wants: Whether it’s sowing promise–threats aplenty, bizarrely inserting himself into random controversies, siccing his army of fanboys onto civilian victims, or revealing information of major economic consequence, these missives are both so outrageous while also so reliably inconsistent that you never know what, exactly, you should take seriously. He seems to genuinely thrive on the chaos he incites with a few taps of the keyboard. His name bears an approximate rhyme to that guttural ugh sound, which is how a good slice of the population reacts when it is raised: Such is the chokehold this particular owner of tweet-happy fingers holds us in. This is not only an extremely powerful man, but also an unpredictable one, which means we can’t look away, despite how much we’d like to.
Eighteen months ago, you’d assume I was talking about Donald Trump. But after being voted out of office and banned from Twitter, Trump’s turbulent wake has left a vacuum in our collective headspace primed for yet another enterprising, tweet-prone mega-ego to subsume. Should we be so surprised? America’s always loved its showmen, and this next one is even better at selling the stories we want to hear about space colonization and climate change and how cool you need to be to date Grimes. Enter: Elon Musk, a bona fide tech visionary and the world’s richest human; the man of the hour whose impulses can flash-flood economic markets, individual lives, and any given news cycle, with a flick of the thumb.
A sampling of headlines revolving around Musk’s Twitter presence that you and I have been made aware of over the past four months include the matter of Musk’s (failed) trip to Berghain, his fear of dying under mysterious circumstances, the role SpaceX’s Starlink service played in keeping Ukraine’s internet running, his support of Dogecoin, how much his SpaceX employees hate his tweeting, his suspicious lack of tweeting between June 21 and July 1, his concerns about the “underpopulation crisis” re: those reported secret twins with the Neuralink executive, plus the barbs he’s exchanged with Trump over Twitter/Truth Social, to name a few. To say that Musk, like Trump, is a richer-than-average creature of Twitter is a willful oversight of the biggest, all-consuming drama of the past three months wherein Musk has roped us all in on his merry lark to become the literal final boss of Twitter. Or maybe not! Or maybe yes? Neither you nor I will stop hearing about him any time soon, which is why I called up a half-dozen experts on the matters of Musk and the internet in order to figure out how, exactly, we got here. Why are we so obsessed with this businessman’s tweets? And has he always been this chaotic—or was there a breaking point that made Musk go full internet troll?
At first glance, Musk’s online antics clearly resemble the shockingly candid nature of our original tweeter in chief; this is a man who understands the cardinal rules of succeeding on the internet, which involve (a) posting a lot and (b) appearing relatable. “He’s the thinking bro’s Trump,” as BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos put it to me. “He’s speaking to the internet in the language of the internet…like, Oh, he’s tweeting memes too? Epic!” Compared to, say, Mark Zuckerberg, whose attempts at relatability have probably resulted in a lifelong aversion to sunscreen, or the Silicon Valley kingmaker Marc Andreessen, who famously blocks the haters, Musk has developed a jokey, enviable veneer of I-don’t-give-a-fuck-ism on Twitter, where he’s objectively popular to the tune of more than 100 million followers. He’s not like other tech titans, he makes (so. many.) weed jokes!
As with Trump, the debate on what, if any, real strategy exists to undergird all the tweeting could provide conversational grist for an eternity. Where Trump’s missives arguably fit easily under a general theory of personality consisting of pure autonomous response, there have been payoffs for Musk’s Twitter persona, even aside from hyping up Tesla or a little garden-variety Dogecoin dalliance. “It’s very tempting to take him as the character he portrays himself to be in his tweets, and not as the actual brilliant entrepreneur he clearly is,” as Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge and Decoder podcast host, cautioned me. “There is a somewhat studied naivete to Elon tweets that is not like Trump at all. Elon plays dumber than he is.”
Take, for example, Musk’s tweet in March about no longer voting for the Democratic Party, warning followers to “watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” posted a day before the Insider report on sexual-misconduct allegations was published—a classic Trumpian shock-and-deflect move. (In a statement to Insider, Musk dismissed the story as a “politically motivated hit piece.”) “He is probably very aware that if he does something like dress up as Wario on SNL, people won’t talk about him firing, like, a Tesla employee who complains about racial discrimination,” Ryan Broderick, who writes the “Garbage Day” newsletter about web culture, explained, before semi-seriously theorizing that Musk’s desire to buy Twitter could very well have stemmed from him wanting to prevent netizens from sharing a photo of his pre-billionaire hairline.
And the cracks in Musk’s online chumraderie do show. The meme-stealing, the tweet-polling, the Chuck Norris punning—for the extremely online, it all accrues into a general suspicion of the billionaire’s overall huckster vibe. “I don’t think he really is a digital native,” Notopoulos says. “He’s just kind of, like, doing an accent.” Rusty Foster, the writer of the “Today in Tabs” newsletter and a self-described professional posting analyst, described Musk’s presence as “very basic”: “He’s like the one guy in the normie friend group who knows how to get into 4chan…. Is he good at Twitter for the CEO of two multibillion dollar companies? Yes. Those people are dreadful on Twitter. They’re like, This isn’t like LinkedIn at all!” Foster’s personal theory? Musk’s ability to stir up shit online is essentially his full-time job now: Attention for tweeting translates into attention for Tesla or any of his other business interests. After all, if the era of meme stocks has taught us anything, it’s that enough hype can equal a lot of money.
Even so, Foster allows that there’s something primally train-wreck-y—or inspiring—about a powerful man with apparently zero filter. “He seems to be pure id and says whatever he wants, and no one can apparently stop him,” Foster added. “Don’t we all look at that a little bit and think, What if I can do that?”
As fun of a parlor game as Musk Tweet Analysis is, it’s arguably the most accessible lens most of us have for understanding the world’s richest man, who’s objectively quite likely to also be the guy who figures out the electric-vehicles revolution, life on Mars, and guardrails against the incoming A.I. apocalypse for the rest of us. After all, this is the man who, at least at one point in time, was revered as a real-life Iron Man around the world (to the point where he made a cameo alongside Robert Downey Jr. in 2010) and accrued enough cultural buy-in to attend the Met Gala and host Saturday Night Live. The tension between Elon the Tweeter and Elon the Mogul lays bare the inherent contradictions of a proven success record and visionary ideals against a chaotic Twitter presence that behaves, as Foster put it, “like an incredibly depressed, unemployed 22-year-old.” How do you square the blatant COVID misinformation and cozy toke sesh with Joe Rogan with the fact that he’s also getting the Walter Isaacson biography treatment as we speak?
Isaacson, who counts Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein amongst his biography subjects, told me over the phone that what appeals to him about Musk is his unusually tangible record of innovation. “Musk is doing something that few others have done in the past, which is building factories and physical products, from batteries to cars to rocketships,” he explained. “I think that’s important, to show that innovation can still happen in complex physical things.” I asked what he thought of Musk’s erratic tweeting; surely, there’s something contradictory about rolling out 420 jokes alongside reams of Teslas. “There’s a goofy and giddy side to him,” Isaacson allowed diplomatically.
The sense that there’s been an inflection point—that is, when Elon Musk’s personality began overshadowing his accomplishments—is shared amongst some of those I spoke with, though no one can agree on the exact time stamp. Broderick pointed to Musk’s onstage interview at the 2016 Recode Code Conference, when the billionaire casually mentioned how likely it is that we’re all living in a simulation. “I feel like Elon Musk learned a new trick with that news cycle, like, Oh, if I just talk like a Star Trek character, people will trust that I know what I’m talking about,” Broderick explained.
It could also be the whole Securities and Exchange Commission securities-fraud-charge debacle from 2018, when Musk tweeted about having the funding to take Tesla private (at $420 a share, of course); his resulting settlement with the SEC ended with Musk stepping down as Tesla’s chairman, paying half of the $40 million fine himself, subjecting his future tweets to pre-approval by a Tesla attorney (last month, Musk appealed an April court ruling that upheld the settlement), but not much else. As Newton put it, “He was able to commit light securities fraud, and it didn’t matter.… There’s this kind of untethering from the laws of gravity until someone or something is able to successfully challenge him. I imagine he’ll just get further and further out there.”
My colleague Nick Bilton, who wrote about 2020 as the banner year of Musk’s career, described how Tesla and SpaceX insiders referred to that fateful “funding secured” tweet as “the Summer of 420,” which was preceded by Musk’s bizarre insertion of himself into the Thai-cave-rescue narrative (also known as the “pedo guy” tweet) just a month before. Bilton’s own theory is that 2018 was simply the point where Musk gave up on faking his way into conventional CEO persona-ship. “I think he just lost it,” Bilton explained. “He tried for years and years to be the normal CEO who, like, posed for the cover of Wired…. I think he started to put the real Elon out there, and he just couldn’t stop.” It helps to think of Musk almost like a comedian, tossing out bombs of varying force to see what lands: “Some instances, it’s funny, and in some, it’s dangerous, and he doesn’t necessarily care or know the difference.”
Matt Levine, the Bloomberg columnist who’s been described to me as “The Maggie Haberman of Musk,” acknowledged the bizarre dichotomy without pinpointing any pivotal moments: “He’s always been a guy who does nonsense on Twitter and who actually runs a bunch of companies that do real things,” he said. “You could tell a story where he’s, like, regretfully but strategically being unhinged online in order to help finance his businesses that he thinks will change the world…or you could tell a story where he is a guy who spends a lot of time working on those businesses and who blows off steam by shitposting online, which I think is more accurate.”
In the business of narrative-making, these competing dimensions of Elon Musk quite naturally force the mind into overdrive in an attempt to solve the dissonance: On one hand, he’s the rare public figure putting his money where his mouth is—including, but not limited to, apparently, his concerns about underpopulation, or keeping the internet running in Ukraine with SpaceX’s Starlink terminals during Russia’s invasion, or advocating for his personal reading of free speech via buying, say, Twitter. On the other hand, there’s the Elon Musk whose company fired employees for exercising a little free speech in the workplace, and who is “leaning” politically toward MAGA 2.0 darling Ron DeSantis for 2024. (And that Starlink service, it turns out, was paid for not only by the warm Muskian fuzzies, but also with support from the U.S. government). Whether you see him as savior or villain is likely more revealing of our own tastes and frameworks than any actual understanding of Musk as an erratic and confounding person of power.
“I would just go back to the notion that Elon’s strength comes from having accomplished really difficult things that he said he was going to accomplish,” Patel concluded, highlighting the 2019 Falcon Heavy launch, when the company successfully shot three rockets into space and landed them all on the same day, as an extremely visible example of SpaceX’s success. “At a very fundamental level, that earns him more trust than almost any politician in our country.” The baseline trust permeates from the way Musk uses Twitter; as Newton put it, “Joe Biden and Kamala are not mixing it up in the comments. Elon sort of does.” In that vein, we can understand Musk as a continuing lesson in how a lot of traditional power and a little internet savvy make for a potent combination at a time when little else feels reliable. “People are constantly talking about Elon in the context of Trump…this notion that, like, you can get away with things because you’ve created your own power structure that comes from an online fan base and your own tweeting,” Levine explained.
And while Trump, at least, now faces a reckoning over his most consequential tweets via the January 6 hearings, one final way to understand Elon Musk as our new main character is to consider the internet that has incentivized the rise of both men. As Ev Williams, a Twitter cofounder, once put it in a 2017 interview, a platform designed for attention will eventually figure out how to supply the car crashes that keep us riveted to the screen. If Trump simply had the original freak mutation that allowed him to flourish in our algorithmically induced attention wars, think of Musk—as well as public figures ranging from Governor DeSantis to J.D. Vance, from Ben Shapiro to Kanye West—as the second generation of species capable of fine-tuning these new evolutionary adaptations to command audiences at the internet’s own warp speed and scale.
Or, as Broderick put it: “As long as there’s a centralized feed where every journalist in the country has to pay attention to it, people will use that or manipulate what people do or think.… There’s always these people who can take advantage of that,” he said with a sigh. “And that’s why we just gotta get rid of Twitter.”
The post How Elon Musk Became the Internet’s New Main Character appeared first on Vanity Fair.
