The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

Yes, the thousands of people that have jobs as a direct result of Musk's actions would do much better with their lives if they didn't have jobs anymore.

High-profile Twitter users were suspended without warning or explanation, then abruptly reinstated.

A new policy to prevent users from sharing links and user names from other social platforms was rolled out, then apparently curtailed.

And Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, posted a flurry of messages to his 122 million followers asking them if he should step down as the head of the social media service while lamenting that no one else wanted the job. (More than 17 million Twitter accounts responded, with most voting he should let someone else do the job.)

It was another chaotic 48 hours on Twitter, which has been mired in turmoil since Mr. Musk completed a $44 billion buyout of the company in late October. His tenure has already been marked by mass layoffs, executive resignations and unpaid bills at the company. Advertisers have balked, rival services have pounced and many of Twitter’s users have feared that the service would simply cease to work.

But over the weekend, a string of actions on the platform by Mr. Musk that seemed random and capricious roiled Twitter’s users so much that outrage mounted — and then edged into disgust. The backlash became so intense that even Mr. Musk’s most strident supporters seemed to turn tail.

Among the critics were Silicon Valley technologists and entrepreneurs who previously supported Mr. Musk, such as Paul Graham, a founder of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, and the investor Balaji Srinivasan. Mr. Musk’s latest actions with Twitter were “the last straw,” Mr. Graham tweeted on Sunday.

The outrage from even among Mr. Musk’s Silicon Valley cohort provoked what appeared to be a crisis of confidence from the 51-year-old billionaire, who was photographed earlier in the day attending the World Cup final in Qatar with Jared Kushner.

“Should I step down as head of Twitter?” Mr. Musk tweeted on Sunday evening after Twitter’s users had continued questioning his actions. By early evening in San Francisco, nearly six million users had responded and the 24-hour questionnaire was tilting toward “yes.”

Mr. Musk, who often wings it in the biggest moments, said he would abide by whatever Twitter users decided. No successor has been identified, he said.

Twitter’s users had become increasingly agitated over Mr. Musk’s ownership since the middle of last week.

It began last Wednesday when Twitter banned more than 25 accounts that tracked the locations of private planes — including Mr. Musk’s — using publicly available information. While Mr. Musk had previously promised to allow the account, known as @ElonJet, to remain online, he then said he deemed the accounts, which also tracked the planes of oligarchs, government agencies and celebrities, a security risk.

Mr. Musk justified his action by introducing a new Twitter policy that banned accounts if they shared another person’s “live location.”

On Thursday, Mr. Musk used that policy to ban the Twitter account of Mastodon, the alternative social media network, after it used its account to advertise @ElonJet’s new presence on its platform. He also suspended the accounts of journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other outlets after some shared links or screenshots of Mastodon’s tweet promoting @ElonJet. (One of the accounts suspended was for Ryan Mac, a Times journalist and an author of this article.)

The suspensions were lifted on Friday after Mr. Musk asked his followers if he should have the accounts reinstated and 59 percent of respondents said yes. But by then, the criticism had piled up.

“If Twitter owner Elon Musk truly wants to foster a platform that allows free speech for all, it makes no sense to remove journalists from the platform,” Jodie Ginsberg, president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement at the time.

Then late on Saturday, Twitter suspended the account of The Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz after she posted a message asking Mr. Musk to comment for an upcoming story. Mr. Musk later said Ms. Lorenz was suspended for a “prior doxxing action,” or the online sharing of nonpublic identifying information. Ms. Lorenz did not appear to have revealed anyone’s personal information in the tweets that were visible in her timeline.

On Sunday, Twitter went a step further. The company abruptly announced a new policy saying that it would no longer allow accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon. Mr. Musk said the change was being made to prevent “relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.”

The move proved highly unpopular with users, who are accustomed to open social networks where messages and videos can be easily shared across platforms. The new policy also appeared antithetical to statements that Mr. Musk has made about his commitment to an open web and to giving people more transparency into the company’s decisions.

Mr. Graham, a Y Combinator founder who had supported Mr. Musk’s takeover, tweeted that the new rules banning promotion of other competing platforms led him to “give up” on Twitter and told his followers to find him on Mastodon. Twitter then suspended Mr. Graham’s account. (Mr. Musk later said Mr. Graham’s account would be restored.)

Other Silicon Valley technologists and venture capitalists said they were “done” with Twitter and began exploring alternative services. Ben McKenzie, an actor and a noted cryptocurrency skeptic, said he was taking a break from Twitter, adding, “This site is not as much fun as it used to be.” Other users accused Mr. Musk of acting like a dictator.

Mr. Musk began backtracking. He adjusted the new policy so that only accounts whose main purpose was to promote competitors would be suspended.

“Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes,” he tweeted. “My apologies. Won’t happen again.”

Moments later, Mr. Musk asked his followers whether he should step down from his leadership role at Twitter. He promised to abide by their answer, but then added, “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”

He directly employs approx 110,000 people. Imagine the people that have jobs as a side effect of those jobs...

On the flipside.
Twitter bots surfaced during Chinese protests. Who's behind them remains a mystery

Quote:

....Twitter's chaos could make political violence worse outside of the U.S.
The seeming surge in spam accounts also comes as Twitter's new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, has slashed the company's teams that worked in non-English languages and monitored the site for disinformation, manipulation and government-sponsored propaganda campaigns. Musk dissolved Twitter's outside Trust and Safety Council on Tuesday.

Some years ago — I think it was 2015 — I got a quick lesson in how easy it is to become a horrible person. I was a featured speaker at a conference in São Paulo, Brazil, and my arrival flight was badly delayed. The organizers, worried that I would miss my slot thanks to the city’s notorious traffic, arranged to have me met at the airport and flown directly to the hotel’s roof by helicopter.

Then, when the conference was over, there was a car waiting to take me back to the airport. And just for a minute I found myself thinking, “What? I have to take a car?”

By the way, in real life I mostly get around on the subway.

Anyway, the lesson I took from my moment of pettiness was that privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement. And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.

That’s why I’m not shocked by the spectacle of Elon Musk’s reputational self-immolation. Fascinated, yes; who isn’t? But when an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.

The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch.

As The Times’s Kevin Roose recently pointed out, Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology the writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public.

But how is this possible?

It’s not really a surprise that technological progress and rising gross domestic product haven’t created a happy, equitable society; downbeat visions of the future have been staples of both serious analysis and popular culture for as long as I can remember. But both social critics like John Kenneth Galbraith and speculative writers like William Gibson generally imagined corporatist dystopias that suppressed individuality — not societies dominated by thin-skinned egomaniac plutocrats acting out their insecurities in public view.

So what happened?

Part of the answer, surely, is the sheer scale of wealth concentration at the top. Even before the Twitter fiasco, many people were comparing Elon Musk to Howard Hughes in his declining years. But Hughes’s wealth, even measured in today’s dollars, was trivial compared with Musk’s, even after the recent plunge in Tesla stock. More generally, the best available estimates say that the top 0.00001 percent’s share of total wealth today is almost 10 times what it was four decades ago. And the immense wealth of the modern super-elite has surely brought a lot of power, including the power to act childishly.

Beyond that, many of the superrich, who as a class used to be mostly secretive, have become celebrities instead. The archetype of the innovator who gets rich while changing the world isn’t new; it goes back at least as far as Thomas Edison. But the big fortunes made in information technology turned this narrative into a full-blown cult, with wannabe or seem-to-be Steve Jobs types everywhere you look.

Indeed, the cult of the genius entrepreneur has played a large role in the rolling debacle that is crypto. Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX wasn’t selling a real product nor, as far as anyone can tell, are those of his former competitors who haven’t yet gone bankrupt: After all this time, nobody has come up with significant real-world uses for cryptocurrency other than money-laundering. What Bankman-Fried was selling, instead, was an image, that of the mussy-haired, scruffily dressed visionary who grasps the future in a way normies can’t.

Elon Musk isn’t in quite the same category. His companies produce cars that actually drive and rockets that actually fly. But the sales and especially the market value of his companies surely depend at least in part on the strength of his personal brand, which he can’t seem to help himself from trashing ever more with each passing day.

In the end, Musk and Bankman-Fried may end up doing a public service, by tarnishing the legend of the genius entrepreneur, which has done a great deal of harm. For now, however, Musk’s Twitter antics are degrading what had become a useful resource, a place some of us went for information from people who actually knew what they were talking about. And a happy ending to this story seems increasingly unlikely.

Oh, and if this column gets me banned from Twitter — or if the site simply dies from mistreatment — you can follow some of what I’m thinking, along with the thoughts of a growing number of Twitter refugees, at Mastodon.