Musk began combining all his complaints into one overarching idea: the threat of wokeness, which he saw as censorious and against the meritocracy he believed existed in Silicon Valley. As Musk became more and more obsessed with woke, his right-wing friends cheered him on. Always desperately in need of approval, the world’s richest man lapped up the praise and decided it was time to get more involved in Twitter, the social media site where he was fast becoming a major celebrity.
He began the process by getting on the company’s board but soon found the position too restrictive. Musk convinced himself that he could quintuple the site’s revenue by 2028 if he had control. He secured funding from Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital, Binance, and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as funds from Dubai and Qatar.
By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.
Despite his bluster about buying Twitter, Musk went back and forth on the deal. In more rational moments, he realized it was a mistake and tried to back out. Musk’s approach to strategy and tactics can be seen in the way he played cards, as Max Levchin recounted.
“There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” he told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said, ‘Right, fine, I’m done.’”
Eventually, Musk was sued by Twitter’s management to agree to the sale. Musk was unable to force the company to a lower price than the gag cost of $54.20 a share, a price he had posted as a joke for his followers as a play on the association “420” has with cannabis. He faced certain doom in court and begrudgingly bought the company in October 2022.
A few days before the deal closed, he visited the headquarters and was disgusted with the company’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion. To Musk, these were signs of weakness. Once in charge, he slashed staff and installed loyalists.
Isaacson argues Musk was irrationally passionate about Twitter in large part because he had paid too much for it and was incapable of thinking logically about the business. It’s true that $44 billion was an overvaluation, but the implication that Musk wasn’t thinking rationally once he was trapped only works if he had been capable of making a sound business decision about Twitter in the first place. Making a meme share price offer doesn’t indicate that this was ever the case.
His passions overrode basic logic particularly when it came to the site’s content moderation. Unfortunately for Musk, moderation was important for running the company. As he tried to make Twitter into an anti-woke, far-right message board, Musk began tilting into extremism and conspiracy theories. The venue he claimed was for unfettered free speech was simply becoming a venue for right-wing speech.
That was no good for advertisers; predictably, revenue collapsed. Twitter had long struggled to avoid placing ads next to extremist content, and Musk’s cuts didn’t help.
Initially, Twitter’s trust and safety department head Yoel Roth was the only one with access to content moderation tools. Roth tried to hold a line on some content but soon found himself at odds with Musk and his allies.
Their requests were fundamentally unworkable on a technical level. Del Harvey, a former Twitter staffer who was the company’s first head of trust and safety, told Wired in November 2023 that part of the problem was that advertising “was built on an entirely separate tech stack than all of the rest of Twitter.”
“Imagine two buildings next to each other with no communication between them,” Harvey said.
The possibility of identifying problematic content on the organic side couldn’t easily be integrated into the promoted content side. It was this ouroboros of a situation, two sides locked in this internal struggle of not getting the information because they didn’t connect the two.
Unwilling to admit error, Musk blamed activists. The platform of open discourse that had been promised was in no way universal—Musk demanded Roth ban boycotts, reasoning that this would stop people from pressuring advertisers to step away from an increasingly toxic platform. Predictably, it acted as a kind of “Streisand effect,” so named for the pop star whose attempts to stop people from talking about her mega mansion in the early 2000s only made it more of a story, and backfired.
Musk continued to make decisions based on his anger over wokeness and his pathological need for praise rather than sound business practices.
