author_is_elon

In the billionaire's story, he's entitled to leave humanity behind

“The hearts of the wise are in the house of mourning and the hearts of fools are in the house of mirth.” Ecclesiastes 7:4

Hello readers,

In Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, journalists Kate Conger and Ryan Mac offer a chronological play-by-play of the billionaire's privatization of the social media app beginning in 2022. As I mentioned before, it’s 418 pages long—over fifteen hours if you choose the audio book.

When I first put it on my Resting Rich Face reading list back on January 5, it felt a bit silly to me. Was I really going to spend this much time on Twitter? Had I learned nothing about the folly of attention seeking and mimesis from the tragedy that befalls poor Lily Bart in The House of Mirth?

But now it’s clear. Lily Bart is all of us. And Character Limit lays out the path of our downward fall.

Main character energy

The portrait that emerges from the book is of a man with distinct “main character energy” but whose character is flawed by a need to be perceived as the hero without actually offering any salvation. In this case, Musk styles himself as the only man equipped to save free speech by remaking the world’s most important app– and any laws broken, regulations ignored, trust or value or careers destroyed in the process are the justified means to the end.

When Musk took over, he stopped paying Twitter's landlords and drastically cut staff by about 80% through firings and incentivized resignations, sending an email that November with the same “Fork in the Road” subject line as the one 2 million federal workers received on January 28. For many of the Twitter employees who accepted the terms, the promised severance never materialized. Some are still fighting him in court today.

He brought young, mostly white, male engineers from SpaceX and Tesla in to run analyses of company personnel and financial data and users’ private information, rewrite Twitter algorithms and establish surveillance of employee communications and badge swipes. A cadre of more experienced loyalists— lawyers, a real estate expert, bankers— dealt with the concerned external parties. Yes, these people often slept in the office.

He cut budgets for all areas of the company, including Trust and Safety, to zero, adding cost items back one by one only as demanded as chaos ensued. With these reductions, he also destroyed the company’s value, losing about 10% of monthly users and reducing its valuation to less than 30% of the $44 billion he purchased it for in 2022, according to Fidelity Investments.

Free speech, not free reach

And what about free speech?  By now, the suspension of Twitter/X accounts without explanation, including those of journalists who write critically about Musk or disagree with his viewpoints (such as Ryan Mac), is well-known.

But there’s something important about discussing free speech, as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, in the context of social media that the discourse often overlooks. Yes, the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to write or say whatever we want no matter if it’s critical of the government or another person. But as social media users, the First Amendment does not protect our right to say what we want to say via any particular platform. That’s because the First Amendment protects the rights of a social media platform to curate and edit its feed, the same way it protects the editors of traditional media to determine which viewpoints, by which journalists also protected by free speech provisions, they’ll publish.¹

So social media platforms have no obligation under the Constitution to treat all speech equally when it comes to decisions about suppressing or amplifying particular content. In other words,  as individuals trying to attract an audience to our texts and images and videos: we have a right to free speech, but not free reach. 

author_is_elon

If Musk or any other executive overseeing a social media platform (looking at you Chris Best) were serious about First Amendment free speech, they’d be transparent about how the criteria they use to not only censor users but also their algorithmic priorities driving the suppression and or amplification of content. 

But if the anecdotes in Character Limit are any indication, this level of transparency could be quite embarrassing. Today is Super Bowl Sunday, the annual pinnacle event for fans of American football. The Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles will face off again, just like they did in 2023. Musk was in attendance then and tweeted from the box: “Go @Eagles!!!” His simple missive attracted 8.4 million views.

Then Musk realized Joe Biden’s more carefully crafted tweet from @POTUS saying “As your President, I’m not picking favorites. But as Jill Biden’s husband, fly Eagles, fly,” accompanied by a photo of then First Lady Mrs. Jill in an Eagles jersey, had 29 million views. He deleted his post in anger and left the game early, flying back to San Francisco on his private jet to met 80 employees he’d summoned to the office late that Sunday night. 

Sabotage or employee incompetence were the only explanations for the low engagement hat occurred to Musk. To calm him, the engineers cobbled together a solution: introducing code “author_is_elon” into the recommendations algorithm to ensure his posts would be pushed into users' personally curated feeds.

As summed up by Conger and Mac:

“Musk may have convinced himself he bought Twitter to protect the global town square or build the world’s most important app. But the truth was much simpler. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, he had bought it for himself, and for a brief moment, he had the thing he wanted most. He owned Twitter– and then it was gone.”

A fate worse than death

In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart comes to realize the futility of her attempts to continue to belong and be held in regard among the rich and powerful, finally taking independent actions that reject the dishonor required to be saved from the fate of an average existence, only to run out of time. In Wharton’s classic America, the main character pays for downward social mobility with her life. 

Rumaan Alam’s Entitlement updates the theme for the 21st century. The main character’s aunt Paige falls in widowhood from the highest echelons of society to eek out a middle class existence, working in a dental office and rooming with a flight attendant. When she’s hit by a bus on the way to work, her chosen family considers it may have been for the best. What kind of life is that anyway? When Brooke, the main character, fails in her attempt to be seen by her billionaire boss as a peer or to fund her dream of owning her own place, she flees into the night– a black woman, dressed in black, standing in the middle of an unlit highway. What could go wrong?

In that novel, Brooke shares a realization about billionaires:

“‘There are men with this much money, and it’s not that they control the world. They’ve defeated it. They’ve left it. They live somewhere above the rest of us and we spend our days not knowing this because if we did we would all lose our minds.’ She thought this was very clear.”

Rocket to Mars

Clarity seems like a worthy effort, in these chaotic times.

Let’s hold clear that free speech is not something a social media platform— or the mogul who controls the algorithms and cash— can offer or take away.

Let’s hold clear that a social media company is not the same as a government, even as Musk tries to operate by the same playbook now to dismantle federal agencies and reappropriate funds allocated by our elected representatives. In this narrative, he rescues America from the fate we’ve told ourselves for centuries is worse than death– the reality that we won’t all be privately rich, that in a free market many of us will need some help from the collective to have a shot at a life worth living.

Let’s hold clear that as we speak Musk’s SpaceX is building a rocket to Mars. In this narrative, this is how he saves humanity. He’s left this world. He’s above it.

If Musk thinks he’s writing the final chapter for humanity, we need a new narrative—one where the future is ours to shape, not his to abandon.

1. Noah Feldman, law professor at Harvard, wrote about this in a helpful way on January 4 “Musk and Critics are Wrong about Free Speech on X” in an opinion for Bloomberg. Paywalled.