When Elon Musk closed on what looked like a massive overpay for Twitter, I scoffed along with everyone else. What we all failed to see was the savviness of Musk’s purchase and, more importantly, his true endgame (as much as Musk could be said to have one).
In terms of bluntly inserting himself into the daily conversation, the value of Twitter, now X, has been priceless. The closest precedent may be the media empire built by William Randolph Hearst — and Musk has been able to do it all with just one little microblogging site.
Sure, the sale is considered the worst merger-finance transaction since the financial crisis for all those banks that agreed to help Musk with the purchase, probably due in part to the fact that usage in the United States has fallen by 23 percent. But even with the drop in X’s usage, and a desperate need to fill X’s void in the social media universe, nothing has emerged to take its place at the head of The Discourse’s table.
The kind of safe spaces that could be microblogging refuges for the media literati repulsed by Musk and his favorite president, Donald Trump — services like Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads — simply haven’t developed the same primacy as X. The service remains a go-to for tracking news as it breaks, even if it is poorly fact-checked in real time. The mainstream media itself can’t resist continuing to lean on X as a source of gathering either the news itself or the sentiment around that news. The media has almost as much difficulty giving up its X attachment as it does its Trump attachment.
X may also be generally stronger than those hoping for a mass “X-odus” might hope, even as Musk continues to roll back popular features, including features that are fundamental to the platform’s safety, like troll blocking.
Globally, the drop in X’s usage has been in line with other social networks. According to X CEO Linda Yaccarino, that drop in total users has been offset by the users who did stick around spending more time, 12 percent, on the platform. In a new media model that is driven by an economy of memes, clicks, attention and the news that only reinforces our own biases, the ability of X, even a diminished X, to be the one-stop shop for all the facets of that economy gives it outsize value.
Musk is estimated to have spent a little over $26 billion of his own money on X. He could very soon recoup all that, though, especially depending on this November’s election result. Hearst may have asked us to “remember the Maine,” but he never got to serve as secretary of War.
Musk, as the Trump cheerleader with the biggest megaphone, is well-positioned whether the ex-president wins or loses.
If Trump wins, Musk could have an unofficial or official influence on policy, perhaps in his proposed and cheekily named “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency). According to The New York Times reporting, Musk’s companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies.
When he isn’t busy profiting from the government, he’s attempting to elude its snares, with companies like Tesla and SpaceX having 20 recent investigations or reviews. As the Times points out, even if there isn’t a conflict within Musk’s direct purview under “DOGE,” regulators may be indirectly pressured by Musk’s cozy relationship with the Once and Future President.
But who’s to say Trump and Musk wouldn’t openly eschew such pesky ethics? In fact, as outlined in the same Times report, “Mr. Musk has hinted at one government efficiency he would like to see: killing NASA’s Starliner contract with Boeing, his main industry competitor.”
If Trump loses, Musk becomes the point of Trump’s media-attacking spear, promoting through his own account and X’s algorithm the narratives that best support a bias toward the belief in a stolen election, undermining what could be a rightfully elected President Harris. For the people “doing their own research” on election interference, Musk and X will be feeding them exactly what they want to see. Whatever the previous failures of content moderation on other social media sites, including the executives at the old Twitter who suppressed the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, they weren’t frequently, strenuously and volubly trying to support a point of view like Musk already has.
Musk remains a visionary, like Schopenhauer writing of talent hitting the target no one else can see or MLK ascending the staircase not yet built. He lives in a future that did not previously exist, one he perhaps willed into existence.
However, the future isn’t one of Musk’s lofty goals like going to Mars or completely eliminating fossil-fueled cars — it is a future where Musk’s media hellscape and personal opinion are able to reign supreme. He is a poster boy for all of us at our worst, an addled dopamine fiend overtaken by the hive mind virus, parlaying his obsession with becoming X/Twitter’s main character for untold political influence at the cost of nearly every one of his ostensibly good works. He gave up being Tony Stark so he could become the world’s richest social media influencer, a curator for the worst the internet has to offer, at great potential profit to himself and his companies, while causing already untold damage to our society.
Now let that sink in.
Ian Chaffee is a technology and startup media relations consultant based in Los Angeles.
