Overthinking Elon Musk

Why is Elon doing what he's been doing?

Earlier week, Ben Collins of MSNBC published an article called “What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter?” Citing texts made public during Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk last year, in which the company forced the billionaire to follow through on his promise to buy it, Collins claims that Musk was following a “road map,” originally outlined on a right-wing website called “Revolver Dot News”:

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.

The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination. 

The text messages described a series of actions Musk should take after he gained full control of the social media platform: “Step 1: Blame the platform for its users; Step 2: Coordinated pressure campaign; Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks; Step 4: Deplatforming.”

In a video posted to Twitter, Collins says that this document is a “clue” to explain “why Elon Musk is doing what he’s doing to Twitter.” Personally, I’m not so sure. For one thing, I think it’s a stretch to describe the Revolver piece as a “road map”--it’s presented as a prediction of how the mainstream media and associated figures would react to a takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, not a guide for how Musk should run the site. (In fact, it doesn’t weigh in at all on a strategy for Musk.)

For another, I’m not sure that “why Elon Musk is doing what he’s doing to Twitter” is the kind of question that needs to locate answers in secret text messages or right-wing conspiracy. It’s true that he has vile personal politics, a deep contempt for journalists and liberals, and an SMS inbox filled with messages from a bunch of absolute ghouls, and I’m sure those aspects of his life inform many of the decisions he makes. But he also just bought a public company using a ton of borrowed money, the way a private-equity firm does, and most of the changes Musk has made to the platform can be better explained with reference to the private-equity playbook than with reference to obscure right-wing news sites. For all that Musk has managed to make his purchase of Twitter about himself, and for all his lofty claims about Twitter as a “common digital town square,” it seems most likely to me that the reason Elon Musk is doing what he’s doing to Twitter is that he wants to grow revenue and expand margins as quickly as possible, even at the expense of user experience and long-term stability.

By “the private-equity playbook” I don’t mean a specific outline or plan, but the general strategy taken by private-equity firms to see returns on their investments: Cut costs and grow revenue. The former is often accomplished in part by laying off a large portion of the workforce; if you are particularly unscrupulous, you might cut costs further simply by ceasing to pay some of your bills. Strategies for the latter depend on the business, obviously--if you’re a subscription business, you might test strategies to drive new or more expensive subscriptions, for example.

Take, as an example, the recent decision to remove headlines from link “cards” on the site, which has effectively turned every account into PopBase. You could, if you wanted to, interpret this kind of product tweak as an attempt to diminish the power of journalism or journalists on Twitter, to prevent them from sharing work or even to push them off the site entirely. But it seems more likely that Musk is trying to design the platform so that people don’t leave it, increasing metrics that might make it more attractive to advertisers.

But Max, you might say, product changes like removing headlines or pushing subscribers to the top of replies actively make Twitter worse and harm its long-term prospects as a viable business, surely they can only be explained by deliberate conspiracy. But harming user or customer experience and worsening long-term prospects for the sake of some extra revenue and cost savings in the short term is relatively common in private-equity investments! You see it quite often in private equity-owned media businesses, which often lard up sites with low-quality ads, fire or remove star writers, and otherwise diminish the product as they squeeze every last possibly cent out of it.

Of course, Musk’s own politics help determine the precise manner in which he pulls the levers available to him, and there are certainly marginal actions--like the release of “The Twitter Files,” or renaming the site “X.com”--that can be wholly explained by his reactionary ideology, love of attention, personal weakness, iMessage interlocutors, and/or overall stupidity. But it’s easy to overrate the extent to which there is real long-term intentionality to Musk’s decision-making when it comes to Twitter, versus the likelihood that he’s been forced down a particular road thanks to his extremely leveraged position.

Musk is a dishonorable coward, and I’m sure he’s in all kinds of shady group chats with weird little blog freaks sending him anti-Semitic memes, and I have no doubt that he’s thrilled his various platform changes have fucked with precisely the people he dislikes the most. But as far as I can see, most of what’s happening to Twitter--all the many ways it has become a worse and more hostile place to journalists, activists, leftists, etc.--is not the product of a single man’s reactionary ambitions but of the structural dynamics of a boss and investor (and his creditors) asserting their power over the company, even at their own long-term expense.