Final evening, after Twitter accepted his $44 billion bid to purchase the corporate, Elon Musk traveled to South Texas, the place SpaceX is constructing prototypes for a rocket system designed to take folks to Mars sometime. Earlier, he had shared a few of his to-do checklist for the social-media firm he might quickly personal outright: “enhancing the product with new options,” “defeating the spam bots,” and making the platform’s algorithms public and accessible for anybody to see. However that night, his to-do checklist was extra concrete. In keeping with the creator Walter Isaacson, who’s writing a Musk biography, the billionaire “held his common 10 pm assembly on Raptor engine design, the place he spent greater than an hour engaged on valve leak options. Nobody talked about Twitter,” Isaacson tweeted. “He can multitask.”
Actually nobody doubts that Musk—already the pinnacle of SpaceX, Tesla, the Boring Firm, and Neuralink—can multitask. The murkiest query about his latest acquisition will not be whether or not he can swap between area journey and social media however what he’s eager about free speech when he’s not considering valves. Proper now, earlier than he takes cost of his new enterprise, essentially the most anybody can do is make educated guesses about how Musk’s stance as a self-described “free speech absolutist” may manifest, and browse his tweets like sopping tea leaves on the backside of a mug.
However a technique to consider how Twitter may fare below Musk is to take a look at how the billionaire operates these different enterprises that occupy his thoughts. Greater than any Muskian pronouncement, that historical past can trace at what his possession may imply—for Twitter as an organization with hundreds of staff, a platform with tens of millions of customers, and an unruly public discussion board on an unruly web. I’ve described Elon’s world earlier than because the Musk Cinematic Universe, and in his companies, as in Marvel motion pictures, sure themes seem repeatedly, impatience first amongst them. Listed below are 4 axioms for what to anticipate subsequent.
1. If Twitter has a manufacturing facility ground, Musk may attempt to sleep on it.
Musk is a widely known workaholic. Throughout notably intense manufacturing sprints at Tesla, Musk was on the firm’s places of work day in and day trip, sleeping below his desk, on a sofa, and even on the manufacturing facility ground itself. The aim in these moments was to provide a number of thousand Mannequin 3s per week, a decidedly extra concrete effort than managing algorithms. But when Musk decides to essentially dive into Twitter, its staff can anticipate this stage of involvement. He definitely has the time. Though Musk is working intently on SpaceX’s imaginative and prescient for its Mars rocket, generally known as Starship, the remainder of the enterprise runs fairly easily with out him, below the watchful eye of COO Gwynne Shotwell, launching each folks and payloads into area with out requiring its chief designer’s presence in mission management. Musk has spent years changing into an skilled in electric-car manufacturing and rocket engineering; his subsequent studying binge may very well be about content material moderation.
2. He’s concerned with his concepts, not your complaints.
Some Twitter staff reacted with “shock and dismay” at Musk’s takeover, based on The Washington Put up, worrying that Musk “would try to interrupt down safeguards to guard on a regular basis customers that workers had constructed over a few years.” And he has given a minimum of one signal that he wouldn’t step in between susceptible customers and aggressive, harmful conduct. Final month, Musk stated that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “some governments (not Ukraine)” had requested SpaceX to configure its Starlink web satellites to dam Russian information sources; Musk stated “we won’t achieve this until at gunpoint.” Amongst a number of doable situations for a Musk-owned Twitter, the almost definitely consequence, as Charlie Warzel writes in his e-newsletter at The Atlantic, is that Twitter will return to an earlier state, circa 2016, when the platform “prioritized free-speech maximalism and underinvested in instruments for customers to guard themselves,” producing an surroundings with minimal moderation and extra rampant harassment and hate. So the customers who stand to have a worse time on Twitter below Musk are the identical individuals who have unhealthy experiences there already—girls, folks of coloration, members of the LGBTQ group, and different minority teams—who’ve benefited most from the precise instruments that Twitter has put in place in an try and deflect abuse.
Some Twitter staff have additionally expressed concern that Musk “might inflict harm to the corporate’s tradition and make it more durable for folks to do their jobs,” the Put up reported. The analogues within the MCU are bleak. Musk is a visionary, however he’s a horrible boss. He has reportedly berated staff and even fired them on the spot. Black staff at Tesla have described brutal cases of racial harassment at Tesla; in February, California filed a lawsuit towards Tesla on behalf of greater than 4,000 present and former Black staff. Final yr, a number of feminine former SpaceX staff described the sexual harassment that they had witnessed or skilled on the firm, saying that administration failed to guard accusers and penalize perpetrators. On prime of all this, Musk has retaliated towards staff who publicly converse out towards his firms. (Musk and his firms have denied any wrongdoing prior to now.) Accordingly, Twitter staff ought to anticipate him to have little persistence with criticism or complaints, nonetheless justified.
3. Put together for rogue proclamations.
Musk has a popularity for setting unrealistic deadlines. Within the fall of 2019, for instance, Musk stated that his Starship rocket would attain orbit in lower than six months; SpaceX has not even made its first try but, and sure gained’t till later this yr, when—as is commonly the case with experimental rockets—the primary one will most likely explode. The area group refers to Musk’s bold method to timelines as Elon Customary Time. Constructing spaceships takes for much longer than reprogramming one perform of an internet site, however don’t anticipate your consumer expertise to vary inside days of a tweeted decree.
On some events, Musk will declare that his firms are going to do one thing—apparently with out warning the managers at these firms, sending staff scrambling to succeed in a deadline they’ve already missed. In 2020, when Musk tweeted that Juneteenth is “henceforth thought of” a vacation at Tesla and SpaceX, some Tesla staff have been already at work. And when Musk’s clarification that staff would want to make use of their trip days to mark Juneteenth, a celebration of the emancipation of enslaved folks in America, prompted vital backlash, SpaceX despatched an electronic mail to workers reversing course, saying that the day would certainly be an official, paid firm vacation, beginning the next yr. So, take Musk’s guarantees with a grain of salt till you see the outcomes.
4. Musk might go full “maker of civilization” on Twitter.
Final evening, Jack Dorsey, the founder and former CEO of Twitter, tweeted that he believes Musk will put Twitter on the proper path, saying “I belief his mission to increase the sunshine of consciousness.” The place have we heard that earlier than? From Musk, after all, who makes use of the road typically when he talks about sending folks to Mars and making our species “multiplanetary.” These objectives, he says, are essential to protect earthly life. Already, he’s doing the identical with Twitter, elevating what occurs on the platform to a priority of civilizational significance and even a civilizational good. “Twitter is the digital city sq. the place issues important to the way forward for humanity are debated,” Musk stated in a press launch yesterday.
However notice that Musk is following his personal imaginative and prescient for humanity, not anybody else’s. So he’s more likely to form Twitter into the form of consumer expertise that he himself desires. And that imaginative and prescient can be backed up by his trademark relentlessness, the speaking about valves for an hour at 10 p.m. on a Monday evening power. Even Jeff Bezos, who desires his personal area enterprise, Blue Origin, to assist return American astronauts to the moon, believes that it’ll be as much as future generations to hold out his most sci-fi ambitions, similar to constructing area habitats round Earth with synthetic gravity. Musk desires to go to Mars now, and he desires the world round him to bear the indicators of that effort. That’s why he renamed a avenue close to SpaceX’s launch website in South Texas “Rocket Street,” even when the individuals who lived close by weren’t all that happy about his presence. Anticipate Twitter to turn into wrapped up in Musk’s utopian—or, relying in your viewpoint, dystopian—narrative, and possibly be careful for a Free Speech Lane close to the corporate’s headquarters.
Musk’s well-known emotions about reusable rockets, electrical automobiles, underground tunnels, and high-speed trains, although, can’t predict precisely what the actual implications of his reign at Twitter can be—notably for individuals who aren’t outright Musk followers, whether or not they’re sad Twitter staff or journalists tasked with scrutinizing his efforts. I’ve been eager about that final one fairly a bit. Yesterday, as information of the Twitter buyout appeared imminent, 4 folks returned residence from the Worldwide House Station inside a SpaceX capsule, splashing down off the coast of Florida. The subsequent crew is scheduled to launch tomorrow. These missions appear routine now, however spaceflight is a harmful and generally lethal enterprise. What occurs if a SpaceX mission fails and kills the astronauts on board, and out of the blue Twitter is flooded with folks attempting to resolve the state of affairs?
Musk would have at his disposal a way to regulate the narrative that NASA, for instance, didn’t have within the aftermath of the shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003—and the company definitely tried to regulate these narratives. Perhaps he gained’t take away important or curious customers in a proper sense, however might he slide into their DMs and supply to purchase their silence, as he did with the faculty pupil who runs an account in regards to the whereabouts of Musk’s non-public jet? (The coed advised me that Musk blocked him after he declined the supply.) “I hope that even my worst critics stay on Twitter, as a result of that’s what free speech means,” Musk tweeted yesterday. Ultimately, these phrases may very well be dramatically examined in a wide range of situations. NASA has employed SpaceX to develop a model of Starship that can sometime land American astronauts on the moon for the primary time in 50 years (sorry, Bezos). And the crew will tweet from the lunar floor, simply as they do from the area station. “One small step” would have gone over properly with Musk, I’m positive. However would the astronauts take an additional beat earlier than posting, to essentially take into consideration what they need to say, not solely as a result of they know they’re utilizing Elon Musk’s social community, however as a result of they’re counting on him to carry them residence?
