Musk’s masterplan for Twitter – by those who know him best
Greed? Or vision? Whatever his motivation, the world’s richest man has a new grand projet that will revolutionise social media
In the end it was a fatal flaw. Jack Dorsey, who co-created Twitter in 2006, hated the idea that one person should have total control of something with as much power to shape global public discourse as a social media network. Founders, Dorsey said, could become a “single point of failure”.
So Twitter never gave its creators the tools to control its fate in the way that other tech companies did. They were not granted shares with supreme voting rights, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin retain at Google, or Mark Zuckerberg does at Facebook (now Meta). But that meant that outsiders began sticking their noses in. And one of them was Elon Musk.
Ultimately, like an unsuspecting Transylvanian villager welcoming a vampire over the threshold, Twitter found itself devoured and transformed into the very beast it never wanted to be. Instead of the “public good” that Dorsey craved, it will now be private, beholden neither to shareholders nor its board. Elon Musk, 50, may not be its founder, but henceforth – as his other companies, notably Tesla, have discovered – he will be Twitter’s single point of success or failure. So what’s his real game plan? How much is bluster, how much is greed, how much is genuine vision? And will he, and his new toy, boom or bust?
Musk, like so many other users, delights in mocking and trolling other users, adopting “goblin mode”, as he puts it, to make infantile and offensive jokes about Bill Gates only this weekend. All of which might be regarded as standard online banter were not Musk himself a regular blocker of those who criticise him. The Associated Press yesterday recounted how his tweets would sometimes slam unfavourable journalistic coverage, “mischaracterising [such] work as ‘false’ or ‘misleading’” and unleashing a mob of his devoted followers to “harass [reporters] for hours or days”.
“[Musk] was totally preoccupied with what people were saying about this or that on Twitter,” a former employee of Tesla told The Daily Telegraph. “It was almost paralysing. You would be in a meeting and he would see a critical tweet and, off-the-cuff, change a whole plan we had spent weeks on.” The former employee, who left the company several years ago, added: “The slightest bit of criticism on social media and he would focus on nothing else. He was thin-skinned. It totally doesn’t surprise me he would want to buy Twitter. It probably makes him feel like he’s beaten his tormentors.”
Defeating online tormentors, in the form of automated accounts or “bots” unleashed to stir up chaos and conflict by peddling disinformation and outrage, is perhaps Musk’s greatest promise in taking over Twitter. His friend Ross Gerber says such bots, often Russian controlled, routinely undermine Western elections. In consequence, Gerber adds, Musk’s plan to unmask them has at its core a grander aim, even than protecting free speech. “It’s about protecting democracy,” he told the BBC. “Elon only gets involved if he thinks [something] is critically important for humanity. He doesn’t care about money at all.”
Which means that Musk, in his devil-may-care way, is aiming for a new approach. Other social media platforms opt for so-called “content moderation” – automatic censoring of the worst, illegal material, backed by human moderators to judge borderline cases. The whole process, like many of the algorithms that select which digital content to put in front of users, is opaque, all part of social media companies’ “secret sauce” which holds the key to their profits.
But Musk plans – or says he plans – total transparency. Professor Timothy Garton Ash, author of a book on free speech, welcomed the move. “Much research shows algorithmic selection effects [are more] important than those of content moderation,” he tweeted.
The hope is not only that such transparency does a better job at cracking down on the torrent of racist, sexist harassment that still escapes current moderation, but that ultimately it will unmask the bots too. If Musk, through such a bold new move, succeeds in doing so, it would represent a radical and triumphant curing of some of the gravest ills of social media – an industry that has seemed every bit as stuck in its ways as car manufacturing before Tesla, or rocketry before Spacex.
Musk claims he wants to loosen the constraints that make some – notably on the political Right – complain that Twitter is a biased forum for liberals. The problem is, free speech online can quickly become a free-for-all which turns off users and, importantly, advertisers.
And for all its cultural clout, Twitter is still small (with 217million regular users), especially in comparison with Zuckerberg’s behemoth (which reaches around 3billion). Fewer than a third of Britons ever use it. So while making waves has not been hard for Twitter, making money has. Presuming Musk wants to change that, one key question is: what size should Twitter be? If it gets bigger, it may lose influence amid the ruckus and noise; meanwhile a Musk-inspired membership plan, as has been suggested, risks limiting its reach.
There is no doubt that, even for the richest man in the world (worth about $270 billion, or £214 billion), the audacious buyout is a big bet. Musk has put about $20billion of his own money on the line, borrowing the rest. If he can harness both scale and significance, however, there is no doubt that he may have snapped up a bargain. Allies say that merely from his own experience
‘He was thin-skinned. It totally doesn’t surprise me he would want to buy Twitter’
on the platform (his account has 85 million followers) to generate truckloads of free publicity for Tesla, he knows how lucrative Twitter can be.
And yet, even if Twitter’s capacity to shape economic outcomes (to the extent that Musk moving markets has seen him incur the wrath of regulators) is as evident as its power to convene expertise (among medics during the pandemic, for example), the platform is a peculiarly personal plaything for the billionaire. He ran notably counter to the Silicon Valley consensus, for example, by taking issue with the banning of ex-us president Donald Trump’s account after the Capitol riots.
Much, inevitably, stands in the way of his noble aims for transparency. First, there will be temptations to abuse the influence that his new status as media-mogul brings him. Truly, he is joining a pantheon of 21st-century titans to rival the glory days of a century ago. Where then it was the newspaper barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer who bestrode the global stage (as well as, in the mind of Orson Welles, Citizen Charles Foster Kane), today, according to Forbes, the 10 richest men in the world own The Washington Post, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Bloomberg between them. Information has never been so prized by the elite.
But influence works both ways. Jeff Bezos, himself owner of The Washington Post, lost no time in wondering whether Musk’s Twitter takeover would hand China, a market critical to Tesla’s success, significant leverage if the Communist Party in Beijing happens not to like the latest Twitter trend.
Even apparently straightforward changes, like the much touted introduction of an “edit” button to alter hitherto cast-in-stone tweets, are fraught. Journalists and researchers will be unlikely to cite tweets (as I have done in this piece) if they might suddenly be different tomorrow. The social network of record? No longer.
Some say Musk, whom no one doubts dreams big, has his eyes on a far greater prize: a site that harnesses the muchvaunted advent of the so-called Web 3.0 – a decentralised internet based on the same blockchain technology used by cryptocurrencies.
It is the ultimate libertarian dream – the creation of an untrammelled media behemoth which normalises the use of crypto (Musk is a fan of the currency dogecoin) – circumventing the economic and broadcast norms of nation states.
“I think there’s a much bigger vision at play than just free speech,” says digital analyst Sara Mccorquodale. “It is about creating the nation state of Twitter. It could become this giant.” On creating such a giant, she adds, rests Musk’s reputation “as a prophet and visionary”.
All of which sounds incredibly dramatic for a man described to The Telegraph by his cousin, Mark Teulon, as “a down-to-earth person”. Musk’s mother Maye was born in Canada before moving to South Africa, and it was with Teulon, a grain farmer near the remote town of Swift Current in Saskatchewan, that Musk worked when he returned to North America from Pretoria in the summer of 1989. His subsequent rise to Silicon Valley megastardom is well charted.
In the mid-1990s Musk and his brother Kimbal started a small software company called Zip2. That was followed by the explosively successful Paypal online payments service, which was acquired by ebay in the early 2000s, leaving Musk with a fortune of $175 million. Then his thoughts turned to space.
By 2001 he was in touch with Jim Cantrell, a rocket expert, before founding Spacex in 2002. “He was very, very smart,” Cantrell told The Telegraph. “What came through was the pure intelligence. He’s got to be the smartest guy I’ve ever worked with. He couldn’t hold a gaze. I didn’t take that as a slight, it was just his mind was working and he was moving on to something else.”
Cantrell says what motivates Musk “isn’t financial at all. It’s about going to Mars. He’s always been consistent about making humans interplanetary, getting off fossil fuels, and preserving democracy by preventing tyrants locking down our freedoms. I’m a registered libertarian so I recognise it when I see it. He’s always been a libertarian. He’s going to de-stasi Twitter.”
Whatever his goals, there’s no certainty Musk will succeed. He has a track record of failing to deliver on ostentatious promises. But such promises have often sustained faith in his products until effective – if less glamorous than mooted – prototypes come online.
Analysts suggest Twitter may simply be a badly run company which will benefit from new ownership. But, as ever where Elon Musk is concerned, it is impossible not to read more into his acquisition.
As one Spacex employee told The Telegraph: “He was much more approachable in the beginning but he’s seen as sort of a deity by a lot of people now.” That kind of adulation can go to a man’s head. So is Musk the Twitter messiah or just a very naughty boy?
“Elon is the best damn operator you’ll ever run into. He deserves all the credit in the world for taking great ideas and making them greater,” says the Spacex employee. “[But] He leaves a lot of people in the dust, which is unfortunate. You’re either with him or you’re not. He’s absolutely black and white on that.”