The Myth Of Elon Musk Being A Genius
Is Musk’s purchase of Twitter the worst business decision ever? Is he actually a moron?
Following Elon Musk’s demand that Twitter employees sacrifice their personal lives and mental sanity to fix arguably the single worst business decision in history of Musk buying famously unprofitable Twitter for $44 billion, the social media site is down to roughly 12% of its workforce as of just a few weeks ago after Musk fired half of the company’s employees and then convinced the majority of the rest it was time to find better, more stable employment elsewhere.
Whether Twitter dies completely from enough engineers leaving that Twitter literally powers down and the institutional expertise on how to keep it running is getting buzzed somewhere in a severance-funded vacation spot, or Twitter limps along with enough trolls, racists, Musk bootlickers, pornographers, and crypto scam artists paying the monthly $8 to keep the lights on, the Twitter we knew and were addicted to might possibly be ending.
It is at least the end of an era as Musk threatens to hide all the content and comments from users who don’t feel compelled to pay the richest person on Earth to use the formerly free Twitter, and whatever will remain of the social media company might feel like Rome following its sack by the Visigoths as its golden age faded into anarchy and decay.
Which sucks for me personally because I had just reached the milestone of 30,000 followers with my satire account The Halfway Post after two years of working on it like a second job, a job that isn’t a job because I cannot help my addiction to following the news, watching our country’s spiraling plunge down the drain of historic indispensability, and mocking it. Great timing for me professionally if Twitter does indeed fall into anarchy and decay, eh? 😜
I’ve been addicted to Twitter for its political commentary and hot takes for over a decade, though I abstained from posting my satire on it for a long time because I didn’t want to contribute to fake news in its public forum. However, Donald Trump’s offensive and unidealistic presidential candidacy, preposterous election victory, and absurdist presidential administration turned America’s politics into a carnival of surrealist chaos, hatred, and meaninglessness.
Politics is and always has been a game of competing cynicism and the meat-grinder nastiness of special interests and pyrrhic compromises, but Trump and his opportunistic yes-men who were all joyously content with cruelty being the end rather than the means of their political efforts convinced me that fighting MAGA absurdity with my own absurdity was perfectly fair game. At least my absurdities were occasionally (hopefully) funny and clever while balancing with finesse on the extremely thin Trump-era line between believability and hilarity.
Satire was much more difficult in an epoch of nonexistent humility, shame, dignity, decorum, and humanistic respect within the culture and ideology of contemporary conservatism, but at least a few times I succeeded, went viral, and made hundreds of thousands of people in a day laugh at Ted Cruz for being the political personification of a shit-stain on America’s underwear.
But if Twitter does slowly die, I hope it at least drags the myth of Elon Musk being a genius down into the grave with it.
To recap, Elon comes from an already rich family, and his own career got started with a few fortunate buyouts from bigger and better companies. Even Tesla got off the ground with another founder that Musk sidelined, and then he built his batteries and cars with a generous grant funding from the Obama Administration. SpaceX similarly gets generous contracts from the US Government and NASA, and Musk was not the original founder. And, all along, Musk has earned priceless amounts of free public relations work from media outlets enamored with his wealth and ability to play the character of genius.
There is an odd American obsession with rich CEOs that has extremely benefitted Musk, and there’s a pervasive perception in our culture that if someone gets rich doing one or a couple things well, they must be brilliant at everything. But talents and skills are not so easily transferable, and Musk’s incomprehensible actions at Twitter have crumbled the facade of his genius mythology.
Musk has shown pretty obvious stupidity firing Twitter employees willy-nilly in ways that violated their contracts and labor laws and resulted in lawsuits, and then begging some to come back a day or two later after finding out how integral their jobs and knowledge was; proposing a new blue checkmark plan for $20, and then impulsively cutting it down to $8 in a random tweet response to author Stephen King; demanding Twitter engineers build and finish the new verification system in just one week and then punting its date to go live because it wasn’t near enough time; having to add an “official” designation next to “legacy checkmarks” because trolls immediately began impersonating famous people (including Musk himself) and companies and tanking their stock market valuations; and alienating Twitter’s advertising clients before complaining about how those clients could choose to stop giving him money as if it was somehow an infringement on free speech.
Meanwhile, Musk has gutted Twitter’s security teams, ethics compliance, and its corporate values on user’s privacy rights, and flagrantly shown disregard for Twitter’s consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission, which will result in ongoing litigation and fines. And who knows what European regulators, much more strict than American regulators, will do in response to Musk’s privacy transgressions. And who knows what other foreign governments will do when Musk’s alleged free speech principles give an outlet to illegal criticism of autocrats and monarchies around the globe. And who knows what kind of bad actors can use this period of service and privacy instability to find, imprison, and kill journalists and protesters fighting despotic regimes.
Joining all these strands, Musk is being forced to contend with his juvenile, laissez-faire conceptions of free speech and Twitter as the public square. Moderating a global social media company is extremely hard and complicated work, and there’s a reason Twitter had so many employees that Musk just fired and pushed out.
Meanwhile, Musk’s bold ideas for improvement are flailing. Studies show that many of the new blue checkmarks are in service of crypto scams and pornography, which will degrade the user experience considerably and keep away the advertisers Musk is increasingly desperate to hold on to for any ability to make Twitter profitable. As racists, neo-Nazis, and trolls are signing up with vengeance to degrade and destroy Twitter’s capacity as a source of mainstream news and civil commentary, at what point does Musk begin having to make all of the complex, nuanced, and circumstantial decisions that will eventually reinstall the exact style and form of content curation and moderation policies that Twitter already had after many years of the exact same problems Musk is now learning how to deal with from scratch?
…Lol, JK, he’s already restricting who can be verified, banning violators, and giving in to demands from advertisers who won’t give him money unless they can be sure their products and services won’t be advertised next to porn tweets and the conspicuous resurgence of the N-word.
This giant mess is pretty funny, but the hilarity would be more enjoyable if I didn’t really enjoy using Twitter, and if I weren’t sad that Musk is driving it off a cliff.
Despite the general sense of sadness amongst Twitter’s mainstream users these days, Musk’s army of bootlickers are flooding the comments of tweets critical of him with trollish snark even though they don’t ultimately care if Twitter goes bankrupt and dark. They’ll find excuses for how Musk totally wasting his money destroying a popular source of journalism and commentary is somehow 4-dimensional chess. Musk’s bootlickers do not debate the merits of his actions in good faith.
“What could go wrong?” they asked when Musk was forced into buying Twitter after trying to back out of the deal until he found out the financial penalties would be severe and lawsuits would subject more of his communications to public scrutiny, and the answer is everything. Everything is going wrong, and it’s spectacular how obvious all of Musk’s challenges and mistakes have been to most Twitter lovers. We mocked him before the deal for thinking it would be a good idea for him or Twitter, called it crazy, accurately pointed out all the massive challenges he’d have to face, and wondered why the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX would want to get bogged down in such a ludicrous acquisition (speaking of Tesla and SpaceX, how much much of these companies’ operations are actually dependent on Musk if he can abandon them to personally dismantle and ruin Twitter?).
Everyone with an objective mind could see that engineering a giant social media company like Twitter is entirely different than engineering rockets and other experiments in physics. The skills are not at all transferrable, and Musk is way out of his depth at figuring out how to moderate hundreds of millions of users across the world. People’s minds and actions are not mathematically quantifiable or easily qualitative. Yet perhaps Musk knows he’s in over his head, and that’s why he’s spending a suspiciously large amount of time every day finding and firing critical employees, replying to a truly inexplicable number of random people’s tweets, and making awful, terrible jokes and puns. I suspect he’s not really laughing out loud when he includes “lol” in most of his tweets and replies. Could Musk really find wasting $44 billion on flying Twitter straight into the ground in just a month and looking like a giant idiot that hilarious?
It’s looking more and more every day like Musk’s gag of walking around the Twitter headquarters with a sink was actually an unintentional joke about how he’d sink Twitter like the Titanic.
MY LATEST COMEDY!
This Is How Donald Trump Can Win A 3rd GOP Primary
Donald Trump’s Speech At Tiffany’s Wedding Was Exactly What You’d Expect
House Republicans Want To Ban The Following Subjects In Schools
Thanks for your eyeballs!
—Dash MacIntyre
Follow my daily Dada news here on Twitter @HalfwayPost, and follow me on Medium for more of my comedy.
Check out my book “Satire In The Trump Years: The Best Of The Halfway Post” available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
Then browse my comedy portfolio.