Observers might point out that Musk’s impetuousness is what brought him success in the first place. Musk’s crown jewel, Tesla, has been dragged down as well-the car and battery company has lost more than half its value since the beginning of the year, in part due to investors’ skittishness over Musk’s erraticism in running Twitter, according to financial-services giant Morgan Stanley. That’s a loss amounting to billions of dollars in revenue. 22, half of the platform’s top 100 advertisers had left, according to progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America. Twitter’s skeleton staff took six hours to remove the tweet, and Eli Lilly subsequently halted all advertising spending on the site.Īs of Nov. One user, for instance, wiped out $15 billion in value for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly after tweeting from a verified account that insulin would be given away for free.
Musk backtracked after the policy resulted in a tide of impersonation accounts. Perhaps the most crucially self-sabotaging change was Musk’s attempt to create a new policy around verification, which allowed users to purchase a blue check mark for $7.99. But at Twitter those measures seem to have had the opposite effect, cutting core engineering talent to the bone and costing the company many of the content moderators who who helped assuage advertisers’ fears over toxic content
To do so, he’s tried to turn Twitter into an organization more resembling his other businesses, notably by purging the company of all employees not “extremely hardcore” in service of his vision. Musk says he will build the platform into something better than it was when he bought it. In the past month, Musk has reinstated once banned conservative accounts like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and psychologist Jordan Peterson, bantered agreeably with far-right figures, and even appeared to take direction from right-wing commentator Andy Ngo over which left-wing accounts to remove from Twitter under the pretense of halting leftist violence. But his online base has an apparent rightward tilt, and after Musk finally gave up trying to get out of his bloated acquisition offer, it became clear just how much that following had influenced him. Until recently, Musk was regarded as an apolitical figure: his politics are “not on the traditional left-right spectrum,” one observer said in our profile of Musk last year.
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Musk’s free speech line has proved to align with the agenda of an American Right incensed by social media platforms banning some of their most influential figures-most notably former President Donald Trump, who was booted from Twitter in the aftermath of his supporters assaulting the U.S. Twitter, though, was an aging empire, and the revolution that Musk proposed was not based on innovation, but on politics. Musk had formerly found success on the leading edge of technological change. Over the past year, Musk has seemed to lose focus on the electric vehicles and spacecraft that built his fortune to instead concern himself with the affairs of the online world, an obsession that perhaps explains his decision this spring to offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, proposing to run the platform based on the principles of “free speech”-at least, as he defined it. But such seductions can change a person, often without them even noticing. The allure is understandable, as the platform provided an endless font of validation from his followers. Musk has spent an increasing share of his time on Twitter in recent years. It was, as my colleagues and I wrote in TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year profile, “the year of Elon Unbound.”īut such radical success comes with its own perils-hurtling through space, one risks falling into the orbit of something else. Stock prices for carmaker Tesla, which accounts for the lion’s share of his wealth, hit all-time highs in November, while earlier, in April, SpaceX landed an exclusive NASA contract to put astronauts on the moon for the first time in decades. Last year, Elon Musk seemed to have escaped the force of gravity.
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