Elon Musk Is a Typical Twitter User, Except for One Thing

Like the rest of us, Musk uses a social media platform. He likes to joke around, but isn't as funny as he thinks he is, he over shares and loves meme, he occasionally goes too far, and he seems to think the platform is unfairly suppressing the views of people with whom he identifies. The difference between the site's median user and Musk's followers is about $257 billion. He has more followers than Narendra Modi and less than Taylor Swift. He is the wealthiest person in the history of the modern world. The final value of his offer was determined to accommodate the inclusion of the number 420, which he thinks is so funny.

It's surprising that Musk would stake so much of his wealth on a site that so many of its users hate. Musk will personally give as much as $21 billion in cash to close the deal, which will represent about 8 percent of his net worth. He would be the richest person on the planet if he took that money and set it on fire. If you went back to just 2018, you would see that $21 billion would be 100 percent of Musk's net worth. The rapid growth of his wealth has coincided with his embrace of the platform as a chaotic communication tool, making the acquisition almost painfully recursive, and now he is using the billions to wholly own the arena that allows him to bring his eccentric persona.

It's another example of a familiar story, where a billionaire buys important information for public discourse. It has been happening a lot recently. The Washington Post was bought by Jeff Bezos for $250 million. The investment firm controlled by Patrick Soon-Shiong bought The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune for $500 million five years later. Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, has been making media investments of her own.

Each of these publications has an editorial staff with a great degree of independence, constrained by journalistic standards created over decades, and often enforced on social media. Musk has said that he would like to make it even more like a site where you can log on and say whatever you want. He disagrees with the current content-moderation policies, which has led to yet another round of mind-numbing culture-war discourse on the site. Liberals are afraid of free speech. All day long, back and forth. One guy will get to transform this platform in his own image, and he seems to be doing so mostly for fun, and possibly for profit. Ben Garrison depicted Musk as a half-man, half-cat, breaking into the bird cage and stroking the bird's head. This is meant to be a positive take on the story.

Musk's acquisition on a platform where many users are obsessed with the site itself has been more than a little crazy-making. The text box of the social networking site still asks every user what's happening and what they're looking at. This simple fact accounts for almost all of the acrimony on there, which is mostly about the content of other tweets. He can't stop looking because he feels that he is being wronged by it. The winner of the entire game of global capitalism is at risk of becoming an example of all that is wrong in the world because of the power and followers one accumulates. Musk loves the site even though his experience with it is most likely horrible.

It's easy for people to believe that the deal is not about a desire to refresh the digital town square, but something worse. Jeff Bezos, the second wealthiest man on the planet, has speculated that the exposure to the Chinese market will make it more susceptible to censorship under Musk's ownership. Some think that his now owning journalists is hilarious. There are people who fear that he will bring back Donald Trump, a billionaire power user of the platform. He stated a desire to rein in bot accounts, which seems like a bigger problem to you when you have 85.4 million followers and have a lot of stock quotes. On Monday, people kept posting unflattering pictures of him from hisPayPal days, or standing next to Ghislaine Maxwell, joking it will be the last day they can get away with it.

This is what scares him about his acquisition, the strong sense that it is an act of vanity, a means of improving the personal experience of one user. There is something to it. Musk is desperate to be thought of as funny, an ailment no amount of money can fix, and perhaps his most relatable quality. His outing on SNL was very painful to watch, even by the standards of today.

Those seem like exciting goals, don't they? I would be fine if I just posted that. 69 days after April 20th, I wrote an actual post from June 28, 2020. I wrote that at the end. I know I say or post strange things, but that's just how my brain works. I just want to say that I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I would be a normal dude?

I know you may not like my jokes, but what you have to understand is that I'm actually cool. The capital markets have rewarded Musk richly for all of that, and at least not uniformly. The closest thing we have to a digital town square is potentially affected by Musk's frustration with the latter. It's not clear if there's anything to mourn in this changing of the guard, except perhaps for the fact that it can happen.

This is what living in a society with individuals who control so much wealth is like: Their whims can be made into reality with startling ease, and their whims can be shaped by the same dumb websites we all use to waste company time. It was run like a kibbutz, but it responded to a diverse web of stakeholders, including Wall Street, customers, users, the press, governments, etc.

If his experiences as a user should shape his approach to governing the platform, his experience as the visionary behind enormous real-world projects may not prepare him for the complexity of managing something as amorphous as Twitter: a throbbing and frequently unpleasant conversation among hundreds of millions of people who have no real reason He may soon discover that it is harder than he thought.

The New York Times Magazine has a story editor named Willy Staley. He edited a special issue about billionaires.