Shaker and mover Musk gets real

Despite being the richest man in the world, Elon Musk doesn’t seem to do what he does merely to make money. He seems to make statements and take actions to shake up the status quo … be it technologically, politically or socially. His Tesla electric cars were a riposte to the “can’t-be-done” cynics who couldn’t see the looming automotive revolution coming.

His ventures into space proved what many experts thought impossible – producing a reusable launch vehicle which returned to its pad at the end of the mission.

So, perhaps it is best to view Musk’s latest headline-grabbing foray – his attempted purchase of a chunk of social media platform Twitter – in that light.

This week, he appeared to back away from his R702 billion bid for Twitter, pending his questions about how many users of the platform are real or fake accounts, known as “bots”.

The reality is that nobody, least of all the people who run Twitter, can answer that with certainty. It could well be that more than a quarter of accounts are not real people.

In the end, though, this could just be Musk poking holes in our very 21st-century belief that such platforms constitute real communities for real people.