Elon Musk has torn up the rules of Twitter but what will he do next?

A year on from taking over the social media site, the maverick tycoon has vowed to save us from AI and watched his new rocket explode. Life on Planet Elon must be exhausting.

It is a year since Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter was accepted and six months since he began his reign of chaos at the social media platform. Picture: Getty Images

When Starship, the biggest rocket ever built, burst into flames last week in the sky above Texas minutes after lift-off, Elon Musk’s SpaceX team dubbed the explosion a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

The tongue-in-cheek euphemism could sum up another grand project of the second-richest man on the planet: his takeover of Twitter. It is a year since Musk’s offer to buy Twitter was accepted and six months since he began his reign of chaos at the social media platform.

By any measure, it has been a disaster. Musk has fired more than 80 per cent of its “absurdly overstaffed” workforce, which he said operated more as a “glorified activist organisation” of leftists than a tech company. He has slashed the company’s value to less than half the $US44bn he paid for it, and is still furiously cutting costs.

“My timing was terrible,” Musk admitted last week in an extensive interview on Fox News. “I must be a real genius. I bought it for at least twice as much as it should have been bought for.”

Workers, for a time, resorted to bringing in their own loo roll to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. The company has been hit with at least nine lawsuits over unpaid bills from vendors, including its own landlord. At Twitter’s head office, Musk recently whited out the “w” so that the sign outside reads “Titter”.

Twitter’s advertising operation – the source of almost all of its income – has collapsed as big brands from McDonalds to Coca-Cola pulled their spending amid concerns that racism and hate speech had surged under Musk’s rule. According to data from Similarweb, traffic has fallen by 7 per cent compared with the same time last year, despite Musk’s public proclamations of soaring user numbers.

Knowing what he knows now, would he do it all over again? “It remains to be seen as to whether this was financially smart. Currently it is not,” he said. “But some things are priceless.” He believes the future of humanity is at stake.

Musk’s Twitter adventure may seem like a departure from his usual fare – building rockets and cars – but in the billionaire’s unquiet mind, it falls very much in line with what he has long argued is his guiding principle.

Musk is what he has jokingly called “a speciesist”: he is adamantly pro-human. Larry Page, the billionaire Google founder and former friend of Musk, once hurled the term at him as an insult during an argument over the threat to humanity from artificial intelligence. Page, Musk said, wanted to create a “digital God” and was far too relaxed about the threat it might pose. “I was like, ‘That’s it. Yes, I’m a speciesist’,” Musk recalled saying. “‘You got me. Busted. What are you?’” Their falling out led Musk to start OpenAI, a non-profit research laboratory, as a counterweight to Google’s domination. He and Page haven’t spoken for years. “He got very upset with me over OpenAI,” Musk said.

Debris litters the ground after the SpaceX Starship blew up. Picture: AFP

Musk argues that all his endeavours, from brain chips to electric cars, are in service of improving the human condition and our chances of survival. Consider Starship, the 394ft-tall rocket that exploded last week to rapturous applause from the SpaceX team. It may not have looked like it, but the launch was a big step forward. The goal was for the unmanned rocket to clear the launch pad, which it did. In the world of rocketry, the testing phase of a new vehicle often ends in a giant fireball. And this was the most powerful rocket ever built, with capacity to carry 100 passengers and to become the people-carrier that Musk envisions we’ll need to colonise Mars. Why Mars? If there is a mass extinction event or a third world war, Musk wants to make sure we have a “seed of civilisation” to start again.

And Tesla? The electric car multinational is Musk’s attempt to fight climate change by killing the internal combustion engine and, longer term, electrifying everything. This month he ramped up a price war with rival car makers and laid out his third “master plan”, a detailed road map to overhaul the global energy system. He has even produced estimates of how many tonnes of concrete and miles of high voltage cable we’ll need.

Which brings us back to Twitter. Musk bought it, he said, because he was worried that its previous management, fired on day one of his takeover, was suppressing free speech – specifically voices on the right. He has veered towards that side of the political spectrum despite voting for President Biden, a Democrat. And, catastrophist that he is, Musk saw this as potentially creating a huge threat for the species. “It is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner without resorting to violence,” he said. Whether he loses his shirt on the deal was a “secondary issue”, he added.

Musk is still worth $US174bn ($260bn), so he can afford to take it on the chin if he can’t turn the company around.

But what seems clear is that the Twitter problem is far more unwieldy than he assumed. What he is trying to fix is far outside his wheelhouse of machines and gears and boosters and gyros. Twitter is a group of loud, angry humans fighting on the internet. That makes it a business that Musk may be uniquely unsuited to run.

The 51-year-old revealed last year that he had Asperger’s syndrome, which made his early life difficult. He was bullied mercilessly at school in South Africa. “Social cues were not intuitive, so I was just very bookish,” he said. “Others could sort of intuitively understand what was meant by something. I would just tend to take things very literally as just, like, the words that are spoken were exactly what they meant. But then that turned out to be wrong. I sort of gradually understood more, from the books that I was reading, and watched a lot of movies. But it took me a while to understand things that most people intuitively understand.”

Musk was baffled by his fellow homo sapiens, so he studied them. And in a stunning turn of events he is now managing 240 million who show up every day on Twitter. In a testy interview this month on the BBC, he challenged his interviewer to give an example of the type of hateful content that many have alleged has risen since he took over. The reporter could not come up with one. “Then I say, sir, that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t give me a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet, and yet you claimed that the hateful content was high. That’s false,” Musk said. “You just lied.”

Elon Musk with BBC technology correspondent James Clayton. Picture: BBC

Within Twitter, his drive to slash costs faster than sales fall has exposed the gulf between his high-minded ideals and his unalloyed, often brutal approach to people. Edicts are handed down in the middle of the night and impossible deadlines are set, all in the shadow of a metaphorical guillotine poised to drop at any time. Cushy conditions have been replaced by an “extremely hard-core” environment of fear that more than one former worker likened to the dystopian adventure series The Hunger Games.

Musk has also used Twitter to settle scores. Last week he finally got rid of the blue tick marks denoting verified accounts in an attempt to force users to pay an $US84-a-year subscription for the status. Weeks earlier, however, he made sure one account had its tick removed first: The New York Times. He said the Twitter feed of the newspaper, which has run articles critical of both Musk and his companies, was full of “propaganda” and the “equivalent of diarrhoea”.

Others received special treatment. Twitter workers sent messages last week “on behalf of Elon Musk” to celebrities including the author Stephen King, the actor William Shatner and the basketball player LeBron James, assuring them that they would keep their blue ticks: Musk was covering their $US84 bill. It created the bizarre spectacle of a billionaire paying for millionaires to maintain a minor status symbol they had not expressed interest in keeping. All three men said publicly they would not pay for the tick. When King tweeted his surprise at retaining his last week, Musk replied “Namaste”.

Running Twitter will not have helped Musk’s personal life. A father of 10 children with three women, he admitted recently that he often sleeps on a couch in Twitter’s offices. During particularly intense periods at Tesla, he has been known to roll out a sleeping bag on the production floor.

Having become a millionaire in his early 20s and experimented with the jetset lifestyle – the big house with a sprawling staff, supercars and private jets – Musk now appears entirely uninterested in such trappings (except for the jet). He claimed to have sold most of his assets, including his homes, a couple of years ago. When he is not sleeping in an office he can be found in a small rented house in Boca Chica, Texas, not far from the SpaceX launch pad. He and the singer Grimes separated last year after having a second child.

Musk works – and does little else. His next project is to save us all from superintelligent AI.

“I’m going to create a third option,” he said. His AI “will try to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe”.

One can hope. Otherwise it could be us humans who will experience the next “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

The Sunday Times