ELON MUSK AND THE EXTREMES OF EGO
OThe entrepreneur’s play for social media platform Twitter is not a bid to safeguard free speech. It’s about the power to impose his way of thinking on everyone else
Chris Roper
nce in a generation, a special person comes along — someone kissed by the gods; someone whose every venture turns to gold. Someone who is so incredibly annoying, so full of themselves, that major corporations want to kill them. One such person is Elon Musk.
I can’t have been the only one who read the recent news that the Twitter board is considering giving Musk a poison pill and thought: “Whoa! That’ sa bit extreme. I mean, none of us condones violence. But really, in this case, who would blame them?”
Imagine my … relief when I realised the “poison pill” was not an indication that American corporations are finally ‘fessing up to the Borgia-like values that underpin their successes, but a reference to a grandiosely named business strategy.
I’m sure readers of the FM will be intimately familiar with the poison pill strategy, but just in case, here is the shortest possible explanation I could find. The poison pill stratagem is a limited-duration shareholder rights arrangement, allowing existing shareholders to purchase stocks at a substantial discount so as to dilute the holdings of new investors, and so protect a company’s ownership.
The reason Twitter needs to consider the poison-pill plan is because the social media platform has become a token in a game Musk is playing. It’s that age-old game played by men who become rich and powerful despite themselves, and though its name changes over time, today it’s known as the game of who’s got the biggest swinging tweet. It’s a game where the protagonists do everything they can to save the world, where “world” is defined as “the way I live”, and where the endgame is to impose their way of thinking about the world on everyone else.
These are Musk’s most recent moves in the game. On April 4, he revealed he had acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him its largest shareholder. Twitter offered him a seat on the board, but withdrew that offer when Musk declined. Speculation in The New Yorker is that he declined because, as a board member, he would have been prevented from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company.
“By reneging on the agreement, Musk is no longer subject to that limit — meaning he can acquire even more influence by snapping up more shares,” the magazine notes.
The New Yorker describes this, dramatically, as “Elon Musk’s about-face on Twitter board seat [setting] up [a] Game of Thrones battle”. Which tells you all you need to know about the asinine and juvenile way this version of
corporate America sees itself.
Musk has subsequently offered to buy Twitter for $43.4bn, saying he’s doing this because he wants to release the platform’s “extraordinary potential” to support free speech and democracy globally.
At a TED conference in Vancouver recently, Musk said: “My strong, intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilisation. But I don’t care about the economics at all.”
On Twitter itself, he said: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?”
He then put up a Twitter poll, accompanied by the ominous warning: “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” The poll asked: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”
There were 2,035,924 votes, with more than 70% of them voting “no”.
So, yes, Musk buying Twitter is basically like a troll getting it together to buy his mom’s basement, instead of just squatting there. And once he owns the basement, his mom won’t be able to tell him what to do. If he decides that being forced to shower once a week is a violation of his human rights, then he simply won’t shower. And Musk is a troll par excellence.
His greatest fans in SA are the Muskowhites, those pallid lads I use the descriptor to refer to the tenor of their intellect, as well as their complexion who excitedly worship at the NFT altar of their stunted notion of free speech.
In their world, you should be able to say whatever you want, without having to worry about whether it makes our society a worse place, or whether it damages any sort of societal progress. It’s all about the individual, and actually, it’s all about me.
Watching these Muskowhites spin their tortuous philosophical defences for untrammelled free speech, which is really just about wanting to be self-aggrandising idiots, is in one sense all very funny. It’s like being a fan of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). You know it’s not a real sport, but it mimics one in such fine detail that it might as well be. While it might all be predictable and choreographed, it still takes amazing physical skill to act it out.
It’s the same with the version of free speech espoused by Musk and his trusty Muskowhites. They do such a good job of acting it out, it almost looks like the real thing. But it’s not.
Musk buying Twitter is basically like a troll getting it together to buy his mom’s basement, instead of just squatting there
One of the most trenchant insights into Musk’s character is one carried in The Simpsons, the perennial animated show that lampoons American values and celebrities. I’m not talking about the 2015 The Musk Who Fell to Earth episode, which is just a compromised celebration of Musk 1.0, before he really grew into the role of the suave megalomaniac we know today. It’s Musk’s cameo appearance in 2014’s Steal This Episode that is the perfect satire of the sort of alpha male, e-dickery attitude that motivates him and his driverlessbrain Muskowhites.
In the episode, if a combination of my memory and a cursory Google search serves me, Homer Simpson is at a theatre to watch a movie called Radioactive Man Re-Rises. The movie starts with what turns out to be an advert for Ask body spray fragrances, a parody of the ridiculous Axe deodorant advertising that we’ve been subjected to over the years a series of hyper-masculine messages mainly featuring assorted sexy women lusting after some random dude who is drenched in Axe.
In the Ask body spray parody, Radioactive Man chases four women on motorbikes into a nightclub. They surround him, brandishing guns, and he pulls out what appears to be a hand grenade, but is actually a can of Ask body spray. He sprays it on himself, and the women dance with him as he delivers the pay-off line: “Don’t ask, do smell.”
In the show, Ask body spray came in four fragrances: Fusion Nights, Arctic Slut, Morning After Melon and Elon Musk. After the episode aired, Musk wrote on the Tesla blog: “You know you’re famous when you get featured on The Simpsons.”
Ironically, or perhaps I mean horrifyingly, in 2021 Axe actually released a limited-edition dogecoin-themed body spray dogecoin is Musk’s favourite cryptocurrency described as a “48-hour crypto scent with a dank musk”.
According to marketing news website We Are Social Media, when Axe sent out its sample cans, it said: “We’re going to the moon. In this can, you’ll find the cryptoconfidence you need to get there. This isn’t a scent to stop and celebrate how far the Doge Army has come. It’s the scent to rocket all the way there. So strap in.”
Musk’s attempt to control Twitter is many things, but mostly it’s the action of a person who has no idea how complex it is to allow meaningful freedom of speech on a media platform, and who imagines that philosophy is like a fragrance. Pick your flavour, spray it on, and the world will swoon at your feet.
In reality, the kind of selfish freedoms espoused by him and his fan boys are just ways for them to reassert their dominance, imagined or real, of a world they crave to make in their own image.