Review
Character
Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter review – the ego has landed, just not on
Mars
This article
is more than 1 month old
New York
Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac paint a damning portrait of the
billionaire who turned the social media platform into a smaller business and a
larger cesspool
Andrew
Anthony
Sun 29 Sep
2024 18.00 CEST
If Elon Musk
is a name that sounds as if it was invented by Ian Fleming, there’s more than a
hint of the Bond villain about the South Africa-born American billionaire. It’s
not just the extraordinary wealth, which hovers around the quarter of a
trillion dollars mark, but the SpaceX business that sends rockets into space
and seeks Martian colonisation (very Hugo Drax and Moonraker) and the
hypersensitive ego.
All of these
sides of Musk are on painful display in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. So unappealing is the
portrait this pair of New York Times technology reporters paint that a more
fitting title might be Character Assassination. Or it would if it wasn’t for
the fact that Musk himself provides most of ammunition discharged in this
damning account.
As the
subtitle suggests, the book focuses on Musk’s controversial acquisition of the
social media platform Twitter, now renamed X, which the authors describe as “a
new, harsher and much more cynical social media company”. It seemed an unlikely
development for someone who became the richest person in the world through
building extraterrestrial rockets and electric cars, but Musk started out as an
internet entrepreneur making his first fortune with an online city guides
business, before becoming even more filthily rich from the sale of his share in
PayPal.
He was also
a Twitter addict, one of those people who couldn’t let a day pass – and often
an hour – without posting his opinion or reposting someone else’s. In a
previous era the gilded classes liked to demonstrate their affluence and
influence with the ownership of newspapers. But as early as 1998 Musk had seen
the writing on the screen.
“I think the
internet,” he declared back then, “is the be-all and end-all of media.”
Although
Twitter wasn’t the be-all and end-all of anything other than cultural warfare,
by the end of the last decade it was established as a vital resource for tens
of millions around the globe, and the company aspired to rival Facebook. Its
chief executive was Jack Dorsey, a curious hippy-billionaire given to gnomic
statements, who tried to navigate a path for the platform between the jagged
rocks of libertarian principle and liberal concern. It wasn’t an entirely
successful strategy, and a divided board eventually encouraged his exit.
His
successor, Parag Agrawal, was a devoted technocrat who seemed to believe that
all solutions to the toxic social conflicts associated with the platform could
be found in better coding. But he never really got a chance to make his mark
because he was immediately shown the door when Musk bought the company for
$44bn just over two years ago. Or rather he was legally compelled to buy it
after making an inflated offer from which, despite his best efforts, he was
unable to back out. The court case that clarified Musk’s obligation also
revealed a cache of text messages the billionaire sent relating to the
acquisition. They show a rash, impatient character given to bouts of
intimidation, grandstanding, depression and megalomania.
According to
the authors, he became obsessed with becoming the most followed contributor on
his own platform
He
practically forced Twitter to sell to him without any due process, and then
complained long and hard that he hadn’t had the opportunity to assess the
company’s true worth. Nor did he have any kind of coherent plan about where to
take the business. He loathed its advertising model, and set about alienating
the companies that provided most of Twitter’s income, yet his alternative –
raising money through a verification system – was ill-conceived and
counterproductive.
The more
revenue declined, the more he stripped the workforce, thus losing expertise
that in turn stymied efforts to reform the business. As he tweeted six months
after the purchase: “How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out
with a large one.”
The
justifying cause to which he lays claim is free speech, a noble concept that
tends to splinter on impact with complex reality.
While the
authors may be a touch too inclined to see any questioning of liberal
shibboleths as tantamount to hate speech, there’s little doubt that if Twitter
always had its nasty elements it has become a larger cesspool, if smaller
business, under Musk.
Throughout
it all, with only minor exceptions, he carries on tweeting – or what are we
supposed to call it now, X-ing? According to the authors, he became obsessed
with becoming the most followed contributor on his own platform, launching a
frenzied investigation when the numbers began tailing off, convinced that
disgruntled members of the old regime had thrown a digital spanner in the
works.
There is
growing evidence to suggest that social media is deleterious to mental health,
and nothing in this book leads the reader to believe otherwise
At one
point, when a tweet he makes supporting one Super Bowl team gets less attention
than President Biden’s backing of the same team, he walks out of the event and
flies to San Francisco to oversee efforts to find out how this presidential
scene-stealing had been allowed to happen.
There is
growing evidence to suggest that social media is deleterious to mental health,
and nothing in this book leads the reader to believe otherwise. The kind of
polarised and insular thinking that algorithms on platforms such as Twitter/X
are primed to spread is in a way personified by Musk, who has persuaded himself
that he is on a crusade to save America and the world from what he calls the
“woke mind virus”.
It’s not as
if there aren’t troubling aspects to some of the more self-righteous social
justice movements, but Musk has climbed into bed with Donald Trump, both men
citing popular support while being chiefly focused on self-enrichment and the
gratification of their overweening vanity.
By the end
of this book, you can’t help but feel that Mars may well be the right place for
this strange and obscenely wealthy character.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário