By Gideon Haigh
TECHNOLOGY
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
Cornerstone Press, $36.99
Elon Musk is a paedophile. Actually, he’s not, or at least there’s no evidence to support such an assertion. So maybe let’s couch it as: is Elon Musk a paedophile? Hey, just putting it out there, just asking the question.
Anyway, this has a context. For in July 2018, before a rapt audience of millions of his followers on Twitter, Musk referred to caver Vernon Unsworth as a “pedo guy”, then when challenged to prove it said simply: “Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true.” To a journalist, he then called Unsworth a “child rapist”.
Elon Musk loved Twitter so much, he bought the company … eventually.Credit: Bloomberg
Unsworth, rescuer of 12 boys trapped in a Thai cave system, had the temerity to dismiss Musk’s airy, vainglorious offers to assist with a submarine. Then – and this is the good bit – Musk subsequently defended a suit for defamation on grounds that his remarks were “not allegations of crimes but joking taunts in a fight between men”. So there: “pedo guy” became fair game.
Winning! And so the world’s best-known microblogging platform further endeared itself to the world’s richest man, until, in May 2022, Musk went the full Victor Kiam: he liked it so much, he bought the company, although not before trying quite strenuously not to buy the company, having realised after a beat it was probably worth nowhere near the $US44 billion ($66 billion) he first offered. Then, again assuming the guise of free-speech hero, he recommitted: “I did it to help humanity, which I love.”
Credit:
This forms the first, fast-paced and crisply reported, half of Character Limit; the second half, far darker, concerns how Musk diminished Twitter’s value by 90 per cent with his particular species of management, sacking most of its staff, and alienating most of its advertisers. “Go. F---. Yourselves,” he told them last year.
Musk was simultaneously rendering Twitter almost uninhabitable by shredding its moderation, thereby welcoming neo-Nazis, antisemites, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and their favoured president Donald Trump, not to mention fraudsters, impostors and child sex pedlars because ... freedom of speech!
Character Limit is not, however, about freedom of speech, which Musk so relentlessly trivialises, and cannot tolerate about himself. It concerns the impunity that wealth affords its holders.
Musk is rich beyond the dreams of mammon, thanks to his prior investments in Tesla and SpaceX. He pursued Twitter, as authors Kate Conger and Ryan Mac say, as “an object of personal obsession” largely because he “thrived on the dopamine rushes he got when his tweets went viral”, and probably also because its chaos and cacophony suited him.
“So many conspiracy theories have turned out to be true!” he blurts at one point, sounding more Steve Bannon than Steve Jobs.
X marks the sport where Elon Musk reigns supreme – and replaces the logo for Twitter at the company’s San Francisco headquarters.Credit: Bloomberg
The problem was, as they observe: “At its core, SpaceX was a physics problem. Tesla was a manufacturing problem. But Twitter was a social and psychological problem.”
Yet the myth of Musk was such that many piled aboard, especially those who saw Twitter as a liberal conspiracy rather than a mediocre business proposition with no prospect of rivalling the reach of Facebook or the ubiquity of Google.
They, Musk’s loyal votaries, are seen in Character Limit behaving with sadistic idiocy: “To employees, it seemed they had moved beyond saving money and were enthralled by seeing how much pain they could inflict on workers … They were the conquering Romans, who battered down the fortifications of what they saw as a liberal bastion in the most liberal city and won. Twitter and its employees were their spoils, and they were going to enjoy them.”
The business solutions Musk posited ranged from demanding loyalty pledges to simply refusing to pay rent on offices. The conclusion is rendered pathetic by Musk’s oceanic self-pity, and the excuses of his enablers. “Elon is special in this world,” says one. “It is our job to protect him and make sure what he wants to happen, happens. We need to protect the mission.” Pleads another: “Can somebody be a little sympathetic to Elon right now? He’s doing everything to fix this company right now but people aren’t trusting him.” Can’t imagine why.
One can quibble only with some of Character Limit’s framing. “To buy and operate a global corporation for one’s own pleasure was unheard of,” the authors argue. “Musk was breaking the rules of what it meant to be rich.” Is that true, though? One does hear echoes of Citizen Kane: “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”
Mac and Conger also sidestep whether Twitter was ever all that significant. It achieved a disproportionate recognition due to a population of media professionals who thrived on the approbation of their followers and prattling loftily about “citizen journalism”.
But it always spread lies faster than facts, and was less a “global town square” for conversation than a worldwide toilet door to graffiti. Its collapse was probably foreordained by Gresham’s Law. Whatever the case, good riddance.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying Musk is a paedophile - it’s just a “joking taunt”. But he is, on the evidence of this book, a bully, a hypocrite and a lousy businessman.
Gideon Haigh’s most recent book, My Brother Jaz, is published by Melbourne University Press at $24.99.
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