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Depending on your point of view, Elon Musk — aka the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter — is either a dangerous madman or some sort of visionary genius.
If you’re one of the thousands of Twitter employees whose jobs are at stake, you’re probably subscribed to the former mindset, and understandably so.
For the rest of us, though, it’s possible he may turn out to be the last. Maybe, who knows, even some sort of modern superhero.
If his recent choice of Halloween costume — Iron Man — is anything to go by, it certainly is how Musk appears to see himself.
Iron Man is a business magnate, playboy, inventor and misfit scientist (remember anyone?) who gains his superpowers not through a radioactive spider or interplanetary inheritance, but through mechanized armor.
Depending on your point of view, Elon Musk – aka the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter – is either a dangerous madman or some sort of visionary genius.
Musk’s belief in the power of science to answer the needs of the world (while filling his own pockets) has always been unwavering. But the problem with Twitter is that it’s not a machine, or a rocket, or a computer program — it’s something far more complex and unwieldy, and in many ways more terrifying: a giant electronic organism made up of millions of individual human minds.
That could explain why Musk, who has taken over the social media platform, is proving useless to run it. For the first time in perhaps his entire career, he has to interact meaningfully with people, and many of them too. Over 200 million of the pests, in fact.
And for a man who has been open about his neurodiversity – he revealed he had Asperger’s in 2021 – that must be quite a challenge.
But the problem with Twitter is that it’s not a machine, or a rocket, or a computer program – it’s something much more complex and unwieldy, and in many ways more terrifying.
Take his idea of charging $8 a month for a blue check, or whatever it is. The network already offers a subscription for paid features, but in Musk’s mind this should seem like a sensible and practical solution to the need to monetize.
But what he can’t understand is why people hate the thought of having to pay for a service they already enjoy, and also feel that this is the coveted blue finch status they hold so dear, on the one hand. would devalue in some way.
He thinks that’s an illogical reaction, and it is.
But it’s also a very human, emotional response that he has a hard time dealing with.
And that’s because for all his impressive IQ, he has the EQ (emotional intelligence) of a garden gnome. For the same reason, he doesn’t understand why it’s so outrageous to fire employees while they’re sleeping and ban them from their accounts. It’s just the way his brain works.
Depending on your point of view, Elon Musk – aka the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter – is either a dangerous madman or some sort of visionary genius.
But there is an irony here. Because if Musk really destroys Twitter with his Iron Man approach, he could be doing humanity a very good service indeed.
Because let’s face it, Twitter has done more to diminish the human mind than almost any other invention in the past 20 years. It’s the intellectual equivalent of an alcopop, a platform that encourages and rewards the worst kind of human behavior.
It helps spread ignorance and misinformation and, through its virtual mafia culture, has contributed to the narrowing of debate, the grotesque simplification of complex issues, the persecution of original writers and thinkers, the humiliation of politics and the rise of a culture of intolerance that frankly makes the Spanish Inquisition seem lenient.
I have no doubt that the world would be a better – not to mention a happier, kinder and healthier – place without it.
Forget sending a man to Mars. Killing Twitter could be Musk’s greatest gift to civilization yet.