To some paranoid persons, obviation is axiomatic: those who critique you are bad; those who agree with you are correct.

Elon Musk is a person who appropriated the old Google maxim ‘move fast and break things’ and applied it to the lives of others. To Musk, there is a clear line between himself and others in the sense where he cannot do wrong, except when he does, and that’s where he thinks he needed to move fast and break things in order to become ‘successful’.

What is success in the eyes of Musk? This book shows, through interviews with more than 150 people, that success in Musk’s head often amounts to monetary wealth; except, of course, when it suddenly doesn’t. When he made the decision to force Tesla employees to work from the office to keep profit running, hundreds of people became ill with COVID-19, a decision that could have killed some of them. Move fast, break things. Oh, yes: he could single-handedly have ended world hunger and chose to not do that¹. Elon Musk, the unclothed emperor.

This book is angering. Ultimately, it shows an extremely mercurial dilettante at play with human lives. The book clearly shows how Musk, through the perspectives of many and crowds at large, has tried to play God and utterly failed. He has, several times, single-handedly made some of the biggest corporate customers in the world shy away from his companies. He shared and continues to share, to this day, antisemitic conspiracy theories. He has single-handedly made the stock values of some of his companies, notably Tesla and Twitter, look like a rollercoaster on a Musk-mercurial and decidedly descending path. His decisions have, albeit temporarily, ruined the stock value of other companies:

That morning, a Blue Verified account pretending to be Eli Lilly, the multinational drugmaker, tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” The post, which garnered more than 3,000 retweets and was up for at least six hours, led the actual company to put out an announcement that the message was wrong and that it was taking steps to deal with fakes. Eli Lilly’s stock dropped more than 5 percent that day.

So, how does it feel to read this book?

It’s a reactive indulgement; the authors must have taken many deep breaths and counted to ten when reading and writing this book. I can’t imagine they’d want to revisit it after the PR rollercoaster ride dies down.

I’ve read Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, Zoë Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter, and Kurt Wagner’s Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter’s Soul. This book is, in some ways, much better in terms of style and getting a lot of information from people who were part of the action (bar Musk himself, who of course didn’t partake in any interviews, except when he was interviewed by the authors of this book, years ago). Where Seymour’s book excels in terms of philosophy, this book shines in laying out how the story played out from the perspectives of regular people, as well as the arse-lickers and banking bandits. In short, this book is well told, it seems. I’ve personally only heard horror stories told by a few people who’ve worked at Twitter, and they, broad-strokes, match what’s found in all of these books. I believe this book should have included more information about how truly addicted Musk was to using Twitter, the app, and how that shaped his decisions, much like how watching FOX News turned Donald Trump into a trumpet for Rupert Murdoch².

When I read books, I leave short notes at points that somehow move myself. I’ve never before written the word ‘idiot’ as many times in book notes as in this one; this is by design. The subtitle of this book says all: the authors want to show Musk off as the insane person that he is; had they tried to show something different, they would have come off just as unreliable as Musk himself. In essence, Musk is the target, but he had help along the way.

People who choose to support Musk in any way partake in endorsing his behaviours. The book starts with telling a short tale of a person, a data scientist, who chose to confront Musk.

[…] over the past two weeks, Musk had fired half of the data scientist’s colleagues with no plan and little explanation of his vision. He had alienated advertisers, undermining the foundation of Twitter’s business. And he had fallen for a blatant conspiracy theory, tweeting out a fake story about the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, suggesting he was enmeshed in a tryst with a disturbed man who had attacked him in his home. It was the kind of absurd fiction that only someone with a warped mind—radicalized by hours spent online every day in their own filter bubble—would believe. The data scientist was horrified. Musk, apparently, was one of the easily misled conspiracists he had studied in his work. Despite all the changes Musk had already made to Twitter, the billionaire had signaled he wouldn’t be resting that Friday. Early that morning, he sent out an email to his employees extending “a note of appreciation to those who were there with me.” “I will be in the office again today,” Musk wrote. “Stop by the 10th floor if you’d like to talk about taking Twitter to the next level. The priority is near-term actions.” The data scientist decided to take the plunge.

The data scientist strode into the conference room. Musk sat on one side of a large oak table, his sagging, six-foot-two frame scrunched into a Herman Miller office chair. The data scientist quickly introduced himself before launching into his presentation. Musk listened intently as he explained his ideas for growth, verification of users, and motivating employees. He then sketched out a vision for content moderation that placed decision-making power in the hands of an organization outside of its owner’s direct control. “Newspapers and magazines have editorial independence, meaning owners don’t get to make final judgments about what stays and what goes,” the data scientist explained. “Social media companies should have the same structure.” Musk wasn’t impressed. “Or not,” he muttered. Musk’s assistant peeked back into the room and said he had another meeting. “Do you have any final thoughts?” she asked. “Yes, I want to say one thing,” the data scientist said. He took a deep breath and turned to Musk. “I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.” The color drained from Musk’s already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist. “Fuck you!” Musk growled. The data scientist grew bolder. He was not prone to conflict or insults, but Musk’s reaction reinforced his belief that the billionaire was nowhere near fit to run a company crucial to the world’s online discourse. He remained collected, but uttered something he had not planned to say. “I hope you’ll declare bankruptcy and let someone else run the company.” “Well, resignation accepted,” Musk snapped. The data scientist made his way for the exit. “I’ll take your laptop,” Musk’s assistant said meekly. He handed the device to her and left. As the data scientist walked back to the desk where he had left his belongings, he could hear the patter of two of Musk’s security guards jogging to catch up with him. He wondered if they would try to hassle him or perhaps even rough him up, but they simply watched over him as he packed his things before escorting him to the elevator bank. As they all got into the elevator car and rode down to the first floor, one of the guards turned to smile at him. “What did you say to him?” he asked. “I told him some things he didn’t like,” the data scientist responded. “It must have felt good.” “Yep,” he said, before stepping out of the elevator shaft, handing over his ID badge, and leaving Twitter’s headquarters for the last time. “To be honest, what I said is what everyone is saying behind his back. But nobody’s saying it to his face.”

Musk is, undoubtedly, a sick individual. I’m not writing these words to be as derisive nor to be as polarising as Musk; he is a product of his time, even though he’s made his own world. He’s built a world of money, and it’s paper-thin. Twitter, his own toy, has radicalised him. He is the wealthiest person in the world but what does that actually mean when he loses billions of dollars at the stroke of a tweet? He is at his core unpredictable, as are most of the worlds he controls (Tesla, Twitter), which do not include his children, one of which changed their name, and the reason for the change was ‘Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape, or form’, in their words.

The book is mainly about Musk and Twitter, which means Twitter employees.

The company needed a leader who deeply understood psychology, politics, and history, and the messy ways people connect instantaneously and constantly online. Instead, it got someone whose offer for the company—$54.20 a share—included a weed joke.

I support people who joke and go against headless ‘corporate culture’. Au contraire, Musk has none of this; he used Twitter so much that he became addicted and his mind contorted. He started retweeting and believing conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and spewed anti-trans garbage. Today, he fully supports Donald Trump.

At first, Twitter was run by Evan Williams, but he was run over by Jack Dorsey, an employee who took over. An employee who clung to vague zen-sounding and philosophical concepts and waved them about in a way to make himself seem knowledgeable.

Dorsey’s personal feelings were an enigma. Sometimes, he could be completely in tune with the problems the company and its employees faced. Other times, he appeared tone-deaf, as when he embarked on a ten-day meditation trip in Myanmar, the site of a recent social media–fueled genocide in November 2018.

The book shows how Twitter struggled to make headway with massive North American scandals, such as Gamergate and what happened at Ferguson. Should they censor tweets? How should they be censored and why? Should they ban and un-ban users? Should they use different ethical frameworks depending on different nations and legalities?

These are not things to be trifled with. Leaked memos from before Musk was forced to buy Twitter show that they never took time to handle abuse³.

Actually, Dorsey wanted to use algorithms instead of humans to try and sort out who should be allowed to do what on Twitter:

Dorsey was fascinated by Bitcoin and wanted to find ways to incorporate the blockchain, the public ledger technology upon which the cryptocurrency was built, into the social media service. Both agreed Twitter had to stop moderating content by hand, picking and choosing which tweets violated its bespoke rules. Eventually, most tweets would need to remain live on the platform, with algorithms choosing which should be circulated widely and which should be choked off from the company’s powerful distribution systems.

This has never worked. Mainly because a capitalist company will rarely care about the humans who use the product in a way that is humanist.

Before being forced to buy Twitter, Musk was, at times, OK on Twitter:

“Please ignore prior tweets, as that was someone pretending to be me :) This is actually me,” @ElonMusk wrote on June 4, 2010. It took him more than another year to post again, a photo of a sign for a Southern California ice rink that he had just visited with his kids in December 2011. Then the tweets started to flow. There were thoughts on philosophy, books he had read, and the occasional brag. (“Got called randomly by Kanye West today and received a download of his thoughts, ranging from shoes to Moses. He was polite, but opaque.”) His early posts were earnest, if random, and while there were some updates about Tesla and SpaceX, most of his tweets gave off the vibe of a bored middle-aged dad.

As is common, things quickly revolved in Musk:

Twitter also accentuated an uglier side to Musk. Having fashioned himself the underdog, he had had no problem going after journalists and industry experts who claimed Tesla and SpaceX would fail. He used bursts of acid text to debate stories on a Tesla vehicle’s short battery life or refute reporting on what beverages he drank at breakfast. He called stories “fake.” It was a business communications style never seen before, with an extremely online chief executive willing to go to the mat over any perceived injustice.

While Musk’s businesses seemed to be booming, his personal life was another matter. He was increasingly erratic, mixing Ambien and late-night Twitter binges. He had a reputation for using drugs including LSD and ecstasy at parties, and would later say publicly that he had a prescription for ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic that can ease depression, and used it to get out of negative states of mind. Close family members became so concerned with Musk’s mood swings and shifting behavior in early 2022 that they began discussing a possible intervention that could make him aware of his issues. The billionaire, however, was unreceptive and evaded his family’s attempts to interfere in his personal life.

Musk’s recurring behaviour in firing and deeply damaging people is a sign of how debilitating capitalism is, as the system has resulted in there being a handful of cretins with endless wallets, people who have debilitated their minds to the degree where everything is a dick-measuring competition, while those vast numbers—the majority, to use the term like James Madison⁴—starve and fight to stay alive. Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, have since long engaged in that kind of competition, even to the degree where Zuckerberg invited Musk to a fight, an invitation that Musk ghosted.

All the while, their decisions affected the lives of people. For example, Musk by forcing Tesla employees to work through COVID-19 (where around 450 workers got infected⁵) and Zuckerberg by letting WhatsApp perpetrate the genocide in Myanmar⁶.

Jack Dorsey and Musk continued their bromance.

“Grateful for @elonmusk & @SpaceX ♥,” he tweeted. Behind the scenes, Musk and Dorsey maintained contact. The SpaceX CEO sometimes messaged Twitter’s leader about his frustrations with the platform, notably about an account called @ElonJet, which tracked the whereabouts of his private plane using public flight data. Musk pressured Dorsey to ban the account, though Gadde and her team determined that the account did not violate any of Twitter’s rules.

I love how Twitter employees openly wrote about how they felt when Musk was finally forced to buy Twitter.

Outrage and frustration reigned on Slack. “Oh man it would be awful if someone looked over all my Slack messages and discovered I think Elon Musk is a thin skinned, self aggrandizing, egotistical troll with a authoritarian management style and an understanding of the issues involved in social media roughly rivaling that of a well read 8 year old,” one person wrote in a Slack channel called #social-watercooler, where employees gathered to crack jokes and banter.

It’s truly breathtaking to see what an idiot like Musk didn’t see before signing a 44 billion-dollar contract.

It was quite clear that Musk did not understand the terms of the $44 billion deal. The day before, he had finally inked a nondisclosure agreement that would give him access to private information about Twitter’s finances and technology. He told James Murdoch that he was in San Francisco to do “due diligence” on Twitter. But the period for due diligence was long gone. If Musk had wanted a peek under the hood to inform his purchase, he would have needed to get it before signing the merger agreement. As Twitter’s buyer, he was entitled to information about the company—but whatever he learned couldn’t change the terms of his contract.

There are many other examples where Musk didn’t understand what he’d signed, for example:

Hayes and Kaiden brought up the fact that on November 1—after Musk was supposed to take over—many employees were set to receive their vest, a bonus grant of company stock. But because Twitter would no longer be a public company, the workers would be entitled to cash bonuses with each share they held equivalent to a $54.20 payout. It would cost Twitter about $200 million. Musk, however, was confused and asked why he couldn’t reissue new stock in his soon-to-be private company. That simply wasn’t in the agreement, Kaiden told him, much to the annoyance of the billionaire who was now on the hook for a massive sum. “No, you agreed to that,” Gracias noted. “Interesting,” Musk responded.

And when he was still missing money that was needed to close the Twitter deal:

Musk was missing more than $400 million, and Gracias demanded that Twitter wire money from its own coffers to Musk so that the deal could close. Segal was dumbfounded. Kaiden and the half dozen other people who listened in to the conversation couldn’t believe what they were hearing.

He was severely out of money, and that affected the value of Tesla stock. The banks that supplied him with money, perhaps notably JPMorgan, created fables to get their money back.

Morgan Stanley prepared a pitch deck for Musk’s Twitter 2.0 and passed it around to potential investors. By 2028, the document claimed, Twitter’s revenue would be $26.4 billion, a staggering increase from the $5 billion it accumulated in 2021. The eye-popping figure was far more aggressive than the trajectory outlined by an optimistic Agrawal at the start of his tenure as CEO, and it seemed improbable that Musk could quintuple Twitter’s revenue.

The picture painted of Musk’s Twitter was one of efficiency. The company would become a well-oiled machine, spinning off $3.2 billion in cash by 2025, and $9.4 billion by 2028, the deck said.

Later:

Musk and the goons [Tesla’s Musk faithfuls] stayed away from the Halloween festivities, celebrating with the Morgan Stanley bankers in the war room. They sipped Pappy Van Winkle bourbon procured by Michael Grimes, a small token after the deal’s closing fees had made Morgan Stanley millions of dollars.

The authors of this book know a thing or two about Musk. They’ve both been burned when Musk has turned against them because of their journalistic reporting on Twitter and Tesla. This book goes a long way in proving Musk’s incompetence and autocratic mindset both in terms of his lack of business acumen, but mainly in showcasing him as an utterly inept person, one who has the most money in the world but still wreaks havoc wherever he goes. All he has to do is ask people, but he’s unable to take in advice, or even to consider advice.

Musk believed Twitter should entice people to try it, and so he demanded that its home page be transformed from a blank log-in screen into an “Explore” page that displayed a collection of trending topics and popular tweets. The move would surely increase traffic and interest, he thought. Musk tasked Davis with finding someone to execute the task, and the Boring Company leader ran full speed to deliver the results, no questions asked. The decision wasn’t informed by any research, user studies, or consultation with Twitter’s engineers or product specialists, but rather Musk’s gut.

Just take a look at the following paragraph, which seems to be a made-up quote from The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, but is most definitely not that.

[Yoel] Roth, the highest-ranking employee responsible for content moderation after Gadde’s departure, assumed he was on the chopping block. But when Musk summoned Roth to meet him in one of the office kitchens that day, it was to put him to work. There was one thing he wanted Roth to do immediately: reinstate the Babylon Bee. The conservative satire site had been banned from Twitter that March after it misgendered a government official. Roth knew he shouldn’t push back—Brazil’s presidential election and the U.S. midterms were days away, and he wanted to hang on long enough to monitor the platform for misinformation during the crucial votes. But he couldn’t help but test Musk’s rationale. “Is it your intention to change the policy on misgendering?” Roth asked. Musk hemmed and hawed, unsure if he wanted to overhaul the policy. “What about a presidential pardon?” he asked Roth. “That’s a thing in the Constitution.” Roth kept gently pushing. “What if someone tweets the same thing that you pardoned the Bee for?” he asked. If the satire publication got a special pass to tweet transphobic content, Musk would surely face outrage from other people who wanted to post the same things but kept getting in trouble. It wouldn’t be fair. Musk understood. There couldn’t be different rules for the accounts he enjoyed, he admitted—that wouldn’t gel with his plans to maximize free speech and let anyone say whatever they wanted on Twitter. The policy would have to be changed, Musk said. Roth, who had helped develop the rule against misgendering in 2018 and spent large portions of his career studying the harassment of queer communities online, agreed to change the rules as Musk ordered. But he offered a word of caution. “Your first policy move, then, would be changing a policy that corresponds with a highly politicized culture war in the United States,” Roth said. “A lot of people will look at it and say, ‘That’s his first step—dismantling a policy that relates to the protection of marginalized groups.’ You’re already dealing with advertiser backlash. I think doing that would not really go the way you’re hoping.” “Misgendering is totally not cool,” Musk told Roth. But the billionaire wanted to distinguish between threats of harm and rude comments, which he thought should receive a lighter punishment. Roth tried to refocus Musk on the bigger picture and offered other choices. Instead of immediately giving the Babylon Bee back its account, what if Musk thought about moderating content in general? Did he want to keep the labels that Twitter had used in the past to flag Trump’s account when he shared misinformation about voting processes? How would Musk like to handle tweets that weren’t immediately dangerous but still broke the rules?

Then, Musk eviscerated his advertisers and blamed them for his results:

Tesla and SpaceX relied on word of mouth and consumer evangelism through Musk’s rabid fanbase. With such strong support, Musk came to see advertising as a waste. “I hate advertising,” he tweeted on a whim in October 2019. But Twitter’s lifeblood was advertising. Ad revenue made up 90 percent of the company’s revenue, or some $5 billion annually.

To try and placate advertisers, Musk started firing people.

Former employees organized in encrypted group chats and private Slack rooms to commiserate and contemplate legal action against Musk over their abrupt dismissals. By Saturday morning, Dorsey, who had said little about the takeover since he anointed Musk in his April tweet thread as the “singular solution I trust,” felt compelled to weigh in. In the months since he signaled his approval of the deal, he had tweeted only a few times, mostly about Bitcoin. But even Dorsey wasn’t blind to the salute emojis, goodbye tweets, and devastation that filled his timeline. “I realize many are angry with me,” he tweeted. “I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.” I am grateful for, and love, everyone who has ever worked on Twitter. I don’t expect that to be mutual in this moment…or ever…and I understand. It was Dorsey’s first public admission that the growth he had pursued as chief executive had put the company on an untenable path, a conclusion long accepted by Twitter’s previous executives and board. Left unsaid, however, was how he—and Twitter’s board—empowered a man with $44 billion to callously slash and burn the people for whom he supposedly felt “love.”

Apparently, Dorsey doesn’t know what love is, and Musk is insane.

Then, Musk decided to have his not-thought-through ‘blue verified’ idiocy implemented.

Twitter allowed celebrities to display a blue checkmark as part of their profile page, to ‘prove’ they were real. This was not a idiot-proof system, which clearly showed when advertisers found themselves trolled and their stock plummeted. Also, companies didn’t like Musk’s antisemitism very much:

As he sat on his plane, Musk read a tweet from an anonymous, Blue-subscribed account with less than 6,000 followers. “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” the account, @breakingbaht, wrote. “I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.” As he read, Musk nodded in agreement. He tapped out a reply on his iPhone. “You have said the actual truth.” The anonymous account Musk was praising had laid out the “Great Replacement Theory,” a crazed white nationalist idea that Jews and the global elite encouraged the mass migration of nonwhite people into Western countries to replace Caucasian populations. Versions of the conspiracy theory had been endorsed by the likes of VDARE, the popular white nationalist publication, and Tucker Carlson, and now it had the imprimatur of the world’s richest man. Musk doubled down with a follow-up tweet. “The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel,” he wrote. “This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.” His comments were celebrated on the far right. Infowars host Alex Jones called Musk’s post “the truth” on his show. Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist who Twitter had reinstated before he went on to praise Hitler, called Musk’s comment evidence that the fringe idea was going “mainstream.” “This is the richest man in the world, and one of the top Twitter users with 160 million followers, casually drawing a link between Jewish influence and anti-white hatred,” he said on his live-streamed show. Musk and X also faced an almost instant barrage of criticism. The following day, Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog, published a report purporting to show ads for brands like Apple and IBM appearing next to tweets from accounts celebrating Adolf Hitler and Nazism. For brands who had stayed close to X following all the controversies of the last year, Musk’s tweet and his social platform’s lax approach to content moderation was too much. By Friday, Apple, IBM, Disney, and more than a hundred other major brands would begin halting their advertising spend on X. It would lead to more than $75 million in losses by the end of the company’s fourth quarter, typically its busiest of the year as companies pushed their products during the holiday season. With Twitter’s advertising business once again on fire, Yaccarino found herself having to defend the indefensible. She, too, had been blindsided by Musk’s antisemitic tweet, but unable to criticize her boss, she sought to find another outlet for her frustration. In a meeting with the sales team the following Monday, two days after the SpaceX launch, she slammed Media Matters for its report, claiming that the organization had manipulated a Twitter feed so that ads would show up next to the white supremacist content. She also said, conspiratorially and without evidence, that the group had released its report intentionally ahead of her daughter’s wedding that weekend. “I am quite sure that was not a coincidence,” Yaccarino said, as she attempted to rally her troops.

For a last example of Musk’s capabilities:

In a bind, Musk flew to Israel on Monday, November 27, to meet with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Wearing a green flak jacket that was two sizes too small under a blue blazer, he walked with Netanyahu through Kfar Azza, a kibbutz that was attacked by Hamas, on an apology tour that would include a live-streamed conversation with the embattled prime minister. Musk would also meet with Israeli president Isaac Herzog and with families of some of the Israeli hostages. One father gave Musk a dog tag to wear as a reminder of his kidnapped son and the other captives. “I think we need to fight this together, because the platforms you lead, unfortunately, have a large reservoir of hatred, hatred of Jews, antisemitism,” Herzog told the billionaire in a closed-door meeting. Musk spent thirteen hours in the country making the requisite photo ops before heading back to the states. He landed in Austin in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and it would take less than five hours for him to be embroiled in his next controversy. That morning he tweeted a meme suggesting that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory “is real.” He deleted that post a few hours later.

Today, Twitter is not valued at many billions of USD; instead, the bird is shot to death. Musk is relocating the Twitter offices from San Francisco to a strange Texan town, possibly just to have his bird close to him. But, unlike the intended kindness of Lennie Small in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Musk hasn’t killed his tweety bird by squeezing it to death out of kindness; he’s lashed it at everything and everyone, thinking the bird is fine, simply because if he says so, that’s the truth, right?