If there is one thing Elon Musk should be universally commended for, it’s single-handedly disproving the existence of meritocracy.
Last year, in his search for external validation, Elon Musk bought Twitter, now known as X, for $44 billion. We are approaching the one-year anniversary of what is no doubt his accountant’s worst nightmare, and it seems that his strategy was to make his impulse purchase as equivalent as possible to shoveling that money in a furnace.
More importantly, it’s also clear that Musk has turned one of the most popular platforms for human communication into a hellscape of bigotry that lacks all oversight.
Musk’s most infamous idea for X was making blue check verification a paid service and pushing posts by users who paid for it while suppressing those who didn’t. Putting aside the lunacy of charging for a functional system and turning blue checks into a weird status symbol, created a massive problem of bias in posts promoted by the algorithm.
Although it’s hard to verify quantitatively, this is partially because the people most likely to pay for verification are people like Elon Musk. The problem therein is that Elon Musk, prior to and especially after his purchase of Twitter, has become a vocal right-wing extremist.
A scroll through Musk’s feed presents an alarming picture to any familiar with the political landscape. On any given day you can find him endorsing and sometimes fraternizing with figures such as Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, Viktor Orbán, Vivek Ramaswamy and a host of others.
Musk also has fervently endorsed right-wing talking points, particularly focusing on disparaging transgender people and pushing the myth that schools are forcing LGBTQ+ identities onto children. He’s prone to alarmism about the “woke mind virus” while simultaneously being content to follow the right-wing outrage train to every destination.
Musk’s biases are clear not just in his posts, but also in his administration. He has consistently failed to remove hateful posts, and an unprecedented rise in hate speech on the platform was evident less than two months after he purchased it.
Part of the reason for this rise is Musk’s stated desire for people to see both sides of the political spectrum.
However, when anybody who doesn’t want certain groups of people subjugated or dead is considered one “side” of the political spectrum, promoting posts from the other side becomes very dangerous.
Nonetheless, Musk has stuck to his guns. Recently, he unbanned an account that was suspended for posting images of child exploitation ostensibly because conservatives complained about the ban being ideological. He also revoked the suspension of Kanye West a month after Kanye directly stated his intention to incite genocidal rhetoric against Jewish people, which led to predictable results.
All of this, as well as much more that I couldn’t dream of having the space or time to cover, has made X borderline unusable for anyone who isn’t a violently hateful bigot, especially due to the impending removal of its blocking feature.
Ordinarily, my purpose in writing an article like this would be to implore people to demand change, through means such as petitioning X’s employees to change policies, boycotting the platform or whatever might be most effective in a usual case. This, however, is not such a case.
Elon Musk has an ego the likes of which I’ve never seen, with no intelligence to back it up. He seems to operate purely on impulse, with every project he’s ever engaged in designed to appeal to his vanity. He’s purportedly in the business of revolutionizing transportation, but he hates mass transit. He wants to revolutionize space travel, but hasn’t had much luck, to say the least.
I have no faith that Musk would be willing to listen to anyone who doesn’t agree with him about anything. Therefore, my desire is for Musk to be broadly viewed as a fraud and failure, for his promotion of right-wing rhetoric to be duly viewed as a desperate plea for attention and for his companies to die a rightful death.
What Elon Musk deserves is for nobody to take him seriously or use his company’s services due to the world collectively realizing what a disaster he is. On the day that finally happens, his wallet and platform will run dry, along with his ability to promote bigotry and conspiracies. I, for one, cannot wait for the arrival of that day.
