Factual Dispatch #59: Burn Down The Digital Town Square, For Fun & Profit
People this rich usually don't make this many mistakes in a row.
We’ve watched Elon Musk, the Emerald Emperor, take rakes to the face in management of his loudest acquisition, X (née Twitter), for almost a year now. The Musk Capades at X have been dissected far better than I could by Eugene Wei, N+1 and Walter Isaacson. Instead of rehashing, the more we look at this, the more we think it’s not a cavalcade of mediocre decisions from an arrogant billionaire. What if the autocrats of the world promised you everything you could ever want, if you just solved this one annoying problem they can’t seem to fix?
Since being purchased, X added almost 39 million to Musk’s follower count, fired over 50% of its employees, pushed “views” a made-up metric that amplifies the wrong content, blocked searches for “(long) COVID,” served ads alongside pro-Nazi content, throttled traffic to sites Musk personally disliked (absolutely kneecapping Substack) limited the number of tweets users could see a day, borrowed ads from Google’s programmatic marketplace, and killed “Circles,” the X equivalent of “Close Friends.”
Instead of fixing bugs or adding useful features, X is going to collect biometric data, employment & academic history, let political ads back on the platform (banned since 2019), try to become a bank, and is pushing hard to become subscription only. This is supposed to be to make X a “super app,” like WeChat, but it’s mostly resulted in more people leaving the platform. And big sites are noticing. CNN, Buzzfeed and other huge media firms saw a 24% drop in referral traffic from 2022 to 2023 on X, and these sites have full time staff dedicated to growth, SEO, and social media marketing.
Just imagine how much worse it is for independent journalists. Andrea Grimes at Dame Magazine underscores the point: as Twitter degrades, truth-to-power journalism gets harder to do. The destruction of Twitter makes the work of anti-authoritarians around the world harder, if not impossible. Scientists, doctors, and professors are leaving X by the literal thousands, as a Nature survey worryingly documented. A study out of Montclair State University illustrated the spike in hate speech usage on X after it was acquired by Musk.
Advertisers don’t expect this to change, as only 23% of surveyed marketers plan to buy ads on X in the next 12 months. The shift from Twitter to X.com resulted in the site losing “search rankings” for something like 12 million keywords? This graph by Eric Seufert at Mobile Dev Memo illustrates just how disastrous the rebrand from Twitter to X has been:
Dropping from 30 to 60 on the iOS Top Free DL chart is brutal, while TikTok & Insta keep steaming along. When X rate-limited the amount of tweets users could see, Spill (the Black-Owned social messaging app) hit #1 on the App Store. X is limping along so badly, Meta launched Threads, a social network without a purpose, just to vacuum up the ever-increasing number of migrants from X. (Editor’s Note: This isn’t to say Threads is successful, as its anemic post-launch active user count shows. Meta still sucks at building products.)
Why is Musk doing this? He’s bad at non-heavy industry businesses sure, but no one could be this bad, at this many things, for this many days in a row. So what if 2023 isn’t the year of Musk Fuck Ups? What if Elon is purposefully delivering Twitter death by a thousand cuts, to guarantee market access in China & India, for Tesla.
Tesla earned $24.9 billion in the second quarter of 2023 alone, with China as critical of a market as can be. Some value the Chinese EV market around $292 billion a year. On the other side of the Himalayas, Modi met with Musk personally, resulting in Tesla getting sped up for approval to build & sell low-cost EVs to another 1.4 billion people. Compare this to ~$5 billion, Twitter’s annual revenue in its best year, 2021. Would you give up a small personal fortune and tank a social network to become Henry Ford 2.0 of the Eastern Hemisphere?
Musk had to feign ignorance when asked why Twitter took down content related to a documentary critical of Modi back in April, with censorship of anti-BJP voices accelerating on the platform only two months later. Musk called Taiwan “China’s Hawaii” this month, after receiving “flattery and feasts” when he spoke to government ministers during his visit to China earlier this year. Who else would benefit from Twitter not existing anymore? The second largest single investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) plus Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s private investing office. Tesla buys aluminum from Russia, and has since 2020.
This doesn’t even need to be a coordinated effort between autocrat & businessman. What would impress Modi, Xi Jinping, Putin, or Prince Salman more than news that Twitter is now completely unable to signal boost the latest scandal they’re hoping to sweep under the rug? Musk also gets a global audience hanging on your every word, and the ability to squelch stories about Tesla or SpaceX. It doesn’t need to be a coordinated conspiracy if everyone involved does what they would do anyway. It’s like we always say, "all piranhas might not be on the same team, but you never see them eating each other.”
Keep your head up,
T
People who criticize Musk for making this-or-that strategic blunder, or this-or-that financial mistake are sort of missing the point.
At a certain level of wealth acquisition, one becomes removed from the practical considerations of "reality". What's $50 billion dollars to a guy who prints billions of dollars every year? Even if "X" is a complete failure, I'm sure that Musk won't lose too many tears weeping into his caviar.
Musk has long ago left the "reality" game, and entered the "megalomaniacal tycoon" game. His innate manic energy (which has always been part of his popularity) is not constrained by rationality, or market forces, or anything resembling normal reasoning. The brakes are fully off the bus, for better, and for worse.
Musk is at a point in life where he gets to purchase a compound, and start obsessing about "Rosebud". He's at a point in life where he can buy a chocolate factory and murder spoiled little children in it. He's at a point in life where he can build a laser to torture British spies who break into his secret volcano lair.
In some ways, this is actually a good thing. He's a guy who takes irrational risks, but some of those risks are likely to advance mankind. His contributions to battery technology, space exploration, global internet, and several other sectors are undeniable. But the same visionary energy underlies "X", which seems to be a shitshow right now.
But I don't think the fat lady has sung for "X". As a useful social network, it is done for. But I would not be surprised to look back 10-20 years from now, and see that "X" has turned into a very different kind of app, which transforms the way we use the internet. Or not. Only the passage of time will tell.
But all things considered, Musk the man is a complicated figure. He is not neurotypical. And we can't easily put him in a box. The way things are going, he is the one who will put us in a box.