The Ingenious Madness of Elon Musk
There is no escaping Elon Musk. Having thrust himself, uninvited and often unwanted, into public consciousness, he is everywhere at once — an omnipresent, Orwellian Big Brother whose smirking visage is inescapable, a jokester, entertainer, provocateur. Commenters lampoon his antics and question his business acumen, even his sanity, but what they don’t recognize is that there is a method to his clownish madness.
Mr. Musk has become one of the world’s richest individuals by deploying a business model that relies on social media not simply to sell products but to sell the once-in-a-generation innovator who created them — the hyperactive, unconventional and very cool genius whose inventions are as smart and ingenious as their inventor. An essential ingredient in this model is the digital army of supporters who hang on his every word, promote his electric cars, cheer his rocket ships, challenge his critics and help keep the value of his Tesla shares elevated.
Past captains of industry carefully cultivated images of stability and maturity because that was what their customers and the markets expected of them. Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller avoided public scrutiny because there was no real upside to calling attention to their monopoly-building schemes, the union-busting violence that had kept wages low and workdays extended, and the often corrupt government favors and funding that had added to their fortunes. But Mr. Musk inhabits a world in which it is almost taken for granted that great fortunes are built on attacks on competitors, the employment of nonunion labor and favorable deals with Washington.
That is not to say Mr. Musk can’t play the role of a staid captain of industry. When interacting with jittery analysts, or when he is trying to assure advertisers threatening to leave Twitter, he can be soft-spoken, articulate, genial. Mr. Musk’s selection of Linda Yaccarino, NBC Universal’s former advertising chief, as the next chief executive of Twitter makes sense for a company that has been bleeding advertising revenue.
But Mr. Musk has another side — the Mr. Musk who loves poop emojis and likened the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to Adolf Hitler.
Mr. Musk freely admits that he paid “at least twice as much” for Twitter as he should have, that his timing was “terrible,” that his $44 billion investment has since fallen to about $20 billion. Yet that loss is a fraction of the value of his $180 billion net worth, much of which comes from his stake in Tesla. Even though Tesla’s profits fell in the last quarter and its share price has dropped roughly one-third from its peak in the past 12 months, it still trades at a rich sum. In a December newsletter, The New York Times Opinion columnist Paul Krugman concluded that investors had fallen “in love with a story line about a brilliant, cool innovator.” That day, Tesla shares were trading at $109.10; they are now trading around $170. Tesla’s equity is still worth more than five times as much as that of Ford and General Motors combined.
What Mr. Musk lost with his Twitter purchase also came with a significant gain of followers and, thus, influence. A year ago, he had about 90 million Twitter followers. He now claims 139 million, with millions more users being forcefed his tweets.
Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter makes perfect sense given his business model. The platform provides him with a guaranteed, uncensorable, unedited outlet to market himself and his products. He can freely promote his genius and his companies, advance his libertarian credos and conspiracy theories, troll his enemies, tell his bad jokes, and feed the daily fears and doubts and hatreds of the fans who, like him, have lost faith in other sources of intellectual, moral and cultural authority.
At a moment when there is so much scorn heaped upon once revered political, intellectual, cultural and religious leaders, Mr. Musk has harnessed that distrust and wooed the unmoored.
He dons his superhero/ savior cloak to rescue the world from the dangers he warns us it faces. His electric cars will save the climate; should the climate not be rescuable, his rocket ships will transport humans to Mars. His Starlink satellites provide “internet to the most remote areas.” Twitter will give us the uncensored news that the mainstream press quashes. His yetto-be-developed A.I. platform, TruthGPT, will be a “maximum-truth-seeking A.I.” and protect civilization from the dangers of the chatbot ChatGPT, which, he warns us, is “being trained to be politically correct, which is simply another way of saying untruthful things.”
Mr. Musk insists that he purchased Twitter because he believes in free speech and in citizen journalism. While other news sites edit and fact-check items, a Twitter-connected citizen journalist can post “news” without any research. The result has been an outpouring of individual truths. Chief among the citizen journalists tweeting forth their truths is Mr. Musk himself. The danger here is that he has conflated soapboxes and news organizations. Twitter is a soapbox, an amplifier; it is not a substitute for a news organization with reporters, editors and fact-checkers.
Mr. Musk eschews debate, dialogue, argument. Because he controls the site and his engineers have adjusted the algorithms to amplify his tweets, he has converted Twitter into his own private trolling machine. Convincing his supporters that every other news source is biased and feeding the “woke mind virus,” he diminishes the quality and scope of public debate.
Instead of promoting dialogue across ideological boundaries, Mr. Musk sows mistrust, which deepens the divide. He has built a silo around his world and locked himself and his followers inside. Every utterance from the outside can, from this vantage point, be dismissed as meaningless noise, “woke” propaganda, misleading, dangerous lies. His truths alone stand inviolate, his genius intact, his products honored and selling.
For better or worse, Mr. Musk is now the face of 21st-century capitalism, a world in which hype and image and endless publicity reign supreme. His antics are not a sideshow: They are inherent to his business, amplifying his wealth and his power.