Mention Elon Musk or his Twitter (X) platform in company and at least half the listeners will adopt a talk-to-the-hand posture. At a recent gathering, one gent said he didn’t care because he didn’t “partake” (in social media); another boasted that he drove a Tesla so that was that. Those gents wield some influence in certain circles. But a wilful indifference to one of the world’s most consequential oligarchs is nothing to be proud of.
The significance of Musk muscles through The Oligarchs’ Grip, a new book that removes the oligarch breed from its traditional Russian 1990s context – when seven opportunists seized control of half the ex-Soviet economy using political patronage and inside information – and employs new definitions. Musk qualifies as one of the world’s top 10 oligarchs not because he is worth $250 billion – that merely describes a tycoon – but because he owns Twitter. As such, he is “someone who secures and reproduces wealth or power, then transforms one into the other”, write authors David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodriguez Guerra. Oligarchs pounce on opportunities invisible to regular mortals, often during social upheavals – “for oligarchs, history is made in the back room”.
This is why Musk’s activities and goals, whether in the back room or in the shop window, matter immensely to all of us.
The Israel-Hamas war has sunk all social-media platforms in a bin fire of distortion and misinformation, but for Musk and Twitter – once the go-to app for a running story, from experts to people on the ground – it marks a tipping point.
The world is reaping the whirlwind of his disbandment of the advisory council on trust and safety issues and his dismissal of the scores of employees who had the job of addressing those problems. The blue ticks identifying people deemed of public interest by pre-Musk Twitter were removed, as were the verified checks for established media accounts, as were the labels that identified government- or state-affiliated accounts. He also began paying account users who drew heavy engagement, rewarding views rather than accuracy. Now anyone prepared to donate $8 to Musk can be “verified” and rewarded with amplifying algorithms.
Some suspect he wants the company to sink so deep that he can buy the debt from the banks for pennies
Musk’s glib manifesto – buying Twitter to “help humanity”, to form “a common digital town square”, for “freedom” and “truth” – are summed up in the platform’s slogan: “People on X are the first to know”. Know what?
Anti-Semitic tweets in English more than doubled after his takeover. Engagement with pro-Kremlin accounts grew by more than a third between January and June this year, according to a European Commission report. In the 90 days after the blue-tick change, engagement with posts from the English-language accounts of Russia, Iran and China soared by 70 per cent.
Musk’s changes on Twitter met their major stress test in recent weeks. The day after the Hamas attack, he was urging followers to follow “the war in real time” – then recommended two accounts notorious for spreading disinformation. Musk’s post went to his 150 million followers and was viewed 11 million times in three hours before he deleted it. Meanwhile he advises the same hapless followers to reconcile the impossible: “As always, please try [to] stay as close to the truth as possible, even for stuff you don’t like. This platform aspires to maximise signal/noise of the human collective.”
He is right about one thing. It’s true that most people around the world get their news from social media.
What is also true is that more people get their news via social media “gateways” than directly from news websites, according to a report by the University of Oxford and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Where does he think the real, researched news reports come from?
That he has done his best to kill the links to credible media – the kind that spends money gathering news, corroborating it, contextualising it, editing it, lawyering it – by removing the headlines reveals more about his freedom to kill the truth than any search for it.
It’s a year since he bought Twitter. The number of daily active users is down, the top five advertisers are spending 67 per cent less on advertisements, his subscription plan is chaotic. The company has lost somewhere between 55 and 70 per cent of its revenue on his watch. It also carries a $13 billion debt held by three big banks caught with a massive loss combined with soaring interest rates. There are rumours that his new chief executive will be moving on.
But here’s how Musk the oligarch wins. Traffic to his own Twitter account has doubled. His follower count now stands at 162 million. He has turned his wealth into political power – a definition of an oligarch – and that massive debt makes him too big to fail.
Some suspect he wants the company to sink so deep that he can buy the debt from the banks for pennies. Musk can afford to wait them out. A man with $250 billion and the power to shape opinion on everything from Gaza to Kyiv to the Kremlin to climate change can do what he likes.
European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton, with the stick of the new Digital Services Act, has warned Musk that his company needs to address “violent and terrorist content that appears to circulate on your platform”. They still haven’t provided any examples of disinformation, replied Musk. Capitalism, we have a problem.