Elon Musk Just Turned Twitter Into the Internet’s Dead End
Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has had two dominant ideological hallmarks. One is a slash-and-burn view of fixing a business, which Musk is now posturing that he’ll import to the federal government. The other is Musk’s devolution into a right-wing ideologue who promotes the “great replacement theory,” antisemitism, and the singular necessity of Donald Trump.
These traits have gotten a lot of attention. Think of all the bad business he’s done: swinging an impulsive deal to buy Twitter at an overpriced $44 billion valuation in 2022, kicking and screaming as he tried fruitlessly in court to get out of the deal, degrading the product, driving away advertisers, and presiding over an enormous decline in the platform’s value. Think of Musk’s impulsive antisemitism, his dogged and ironic anti-immigrant position, his retooling of the renamed X to make it a right-wing playground, and the nine figures he spent in a successful effort to return Trump to the White House. Musk did not have a grand plan when he bought Twitter, but I’ll give him this: The hackneyed purchase wound up buying him a country.
A supposed third ideology of Musk’s also gets a bit of attention: He is hostile to news. This thought about Musk isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. Musk indeed fights with the mainstream press a lot, and he notoriously turned Twitter’s media relations email into a bot that responded to press inquiries with a poop emoji. He has made X a platform where it is more or less impossible to find ordinary, informative news without fighting through a deluge of viral engagement bait, unattributed or unverified headlines designed to get reposts, and outright falsehoods meant to gin up engagement. He is one of the biggest enemies of the accurate exchange of information that the internet has ever seen. Yes, he is hostile to news.
