It would flatter Elon Musk to call him chaotic. Everything about the serial entrepreneur's breakneck acquisition of Twitter reflects a dual ambition to win and to wind up – the richest man on the planet delights in being the social media platform's biggest troll. Even his offer price of $54.20 per share, by referencing the American "420" slang for pot consumption, doubles as audacious manoeuvre and cannabis joke.
Reaction to his swoop on the social media platform – celebrated by Musk with a “Yesss!!!” bookended by rocket, heart and “dizzy” shooting star emojis – runs the spectrum from despair to incredulity. And that’s just within the ranks of its employees.
“Can someone just tell me if I’m rich or fired please,” tweeted one London-based executive, while a New York recruiter posted a viral screengrab of uber-prat Roman Roy squirming hard in the boardroom of TV drama Succession, captioning it “me delivering an offer to a candidate as the Elon news broke”.
Staff at Twitter's European headquarters in Dublin, headed by Sinéad McSweeney, will be among those considering their career options and the fate of the restricted stock units they receive as part of their pay. A cohort of users, too, are announcing their intention to break free of the Stockholm syndrome that Twitter exerts upon them before Musk can remodel it in his own erratic, impetuous image.
Some of this is heartfelt, some of it may be posturing. But one thing is clear: if Musk’s $44 billion buyout goes ahead, it will no longer remain the same company, nor will Twitter be the same place. So why on earth does he want it?
It can't be about the money, as Twitter doesn't make any. It has only occasionally turned a profit, and those sums have been modest compared to the jackpots struck most quarters by giants such as Facebook parent Meta. Influential though it may be in political and media circles, Twitter's daily active user count of 229 million renders it a relative commercial minnow. Transforming the "bird app" into a profit machine could be almost as long a shot as one of Musk's other fascinations – the human colonisation of Mars.
Overpaying
He says he doesn’t “care about the economics”, which is lucky, as the trajectory of Twitter’s share price since its board accepted his offer suggests Wall Street thinks he is overpaying. Nor is it as simple as deciding this is merely the modern billionaire’s vanity project, an update on the newspaper proprietorships of old. It is also not what Musk himself is saying.
When he opened his pre-bid salvo against Twitter in late March – days after challenging Vladimir Putin to "single combat" – it was to poll his then 82 million followers on whether they believed the platform "rigorously adheres" to the principle of free speech. The tech libertarian and self-styled "free speech absolutist" now appears to want to open several interlinked Pandora's boxes at once.
“We will defeat the spam bots or die trying!” is the least controversial. More awkwardly, he says he will bring transparency to its algorithm. This is already lending encouragement to the convictions of US Republicans who insist their tweets are hidden while those of the left are amplified. He also wants to “authenticate all real humans” in an apparent leap away from Twitter’s embrace of the anonymous that is not entirely compatible with his stance on free expression.
He is the richest man who has ever lived – on paper, anyway
Responding to commentary that more lax content moderation would make the platform an unusable cesspit of hate speech – plus a warning from the European Union that it has rules about this kind of thing – Musk has been moved to say he means free speech that "matches the law".
The clarification, which began with a punchy dismissal of "the extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech", is unlikely to allay concerns that a Musk-era Twitter will be one that welcomes back Donald Trump, perpetuates disinformation and facilitates fascism.
All this may be baffling to the three-quarters of Irish adults who don't have a Twitter account, according to a recent survey by research firm Ipsos. The ascent of Musk, too, might have passed many by. Who is this guy?
For starters, thanks to an explosion in the share price of Tesla, the electric vehicle market leading company of which he is chief executive and the largest shareholder, he is the richest man who has ever lived – on paper, anyway.
Such is the volatility of Tesla’s stock market performance – not helped by Musk tweets such as “Tesla stock price is too high” or his berating of analysts asking “bonehead” financial questions – that his wealth oscillates wildly. After reaching a high of $340 billion last November, then sinking beneath $200 billion in February, it hovered at about $250 billion this week. He could be a trillionaire-in-waiting or on the cusp of losing more money than anyone has ever lost. Either way, none of this is normal.
Die-hard fans
And yet Musk (50), a billionaire since 2012, has die-hard fans for a reason. The entrepreneurial record of this software engineer has had several chapters, each one more successful than the next.
In the mid-1990s, he co-founded Zip2, a Silicon Valley provider of licensed city guide software to newspapers. After offloading it, he established X.com, which merged with another fintech start-up, Confinity, to form PayPal. Its sale to eBay in 2002 netted him $180 million.
But it was his investment in the pioneering Tesla and then SpaceX, now a rocket and satellite behemoth, that made him a hero to a youthful base of “fanboys”. At a time when it seemed business figures were only making headlines because they were fraudsters or bankers who missed the macro-risks of sub-prime mortgages, Texas-dwelling Musk manifested as a buccaneering innovator who understood the future.
Musk has downplayed the privilege of his upbringing, tweeting that he amassed $100,000 in student debt as he worked his way through Canadian and US colleges
Hollywood chipped in with some convenient myth-making. Musk was said to be an inspiration for Robert Downey jnr's portrayal of Tony Stark, the ultra-confident industrialist of Marvel's Iron Man films. In Iron Man 2 (2010), Musk made a 12-second cameo as himself.
His many contradictions have proliferated alongside the zeroes in his bank balance. A renegade in a white jacket, he is skittish but visionary. He adopts the culture-war talking points of the right, complaining about a “woke mind virus”, yet uses Tesla, a company that has been censured for violating US labour practices, to claim the role of climate saviour when it suits.
Mad king
But it is on Twitter where he has most often displayed his penchant for playing both the jester and the mad king who must be taken seriously even when he is not being serious.
Whether he is touting cryptocurrencies or transport systems called hyperloops, quoting Robert Frost poems and Elvis lyrics, baselessly branding a man involved in a cave rescue operation a "pedo guy", posting misleading and market-sensitive information that attracts multimillion dollar fines or crassly mocking Bill Gates for his paunch, the suspicion must be that the one true currency he values is attention.
Born in Pretoria in apartheid South Africa in 1971, Musk is the eldest child of Maye Musk, a Canadian model, dietician and now public speaker, and Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer and property developer. The couple, who had two more children, divorced when Musk was eight, with Maye calling the marriage "physically and mentally abusive".
Origin story
Musk has downplayed the privilege of his upbringing, tweeting that he amassed $100,000 in student debt as he worked his way through Canadian and US colleges. Every entrepreneur has an origin story that leans more heavily on young ingenuity than inherited advantages. His is that he made his first $500 selling a space-themed computer game called Blastar to a trade magazine at the age of 12.
What is clear is that his childhood was not without pain. In 2017, he told Rolling Stone that Errol, who has fathered a child with his stepdaughter from a subsequent marriage, was a “terrible human being” who had done “almost every evil thing you can possibly think of”.
Musk's own personal life has been tabloid material. He has been married three times, twice to the same woman. His first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, wrote in 2010 that as they danced at their wedding, Musk told her "I am the alpha in this relationship". She would remind him that she was his wife, not his employee. The couple had six sons together, their first, named Nevada, dying of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks.
Musk filed for divorce in 2008, texting Wilson six weeks later to say he was engaged to the British actor Talulah Riley. Musk and Riley married, divorced, remarried, then redivorced.
After a brief spell dating Amber Heard, Musk bonded with Canadian musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, over an obscure artificial intelligence pun, which Musk discovered Grimes had made first. The couple, who posed for Met Gala cameras in 2018, have two children, a boy called X – originally named X AE A-12 – and a girl nicknamed Y. But the relationship turned “fluid” last year, and Grimes tweeted in March that they had broken up.
Even by the standards of billionaires, it has been a whirlwind few months for Musk. Despite the $1 billion termination fee it would incur, his mercurial nature combined with the high-stakes finance involved mean it would not be surprising if his purchase of Twitter was to collapse in an emoji-riddled heap of recrimination.
‘Global consciousness’
In the meantime, few are swallowing the verdict of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who described the 18-year-old platform as "the closest thing we have to a global consciousness" and mused that no one should own or run it, but then said he trusted Musk to "extend the light of consciousness".
When a celebrity tweets something newsworthy, it is sometimes said they have “taken to Twitter”. Now one man appears to have just taken Twitter.
The “digital town square”, as Musk dubbed it this week in a rare dash of corporate-speak, could become a place where a single individual has sole ownership and ultimate control of the noticeboards, soapboxes and megaphones. Even if he had the most sober persona on earth and only the most benevolent of intentions, this demonstration of power would still be astonishing.
If he lands Twitter, the conclusion must be it is because he can.
