TECHNOLOGY
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
Cornerstone Press, $36.99
Elon Musk is a paedophile. Actually, he’s not, or at least there’s no evidence to support such an assertion. So maybe let’s couch it as: is Elon Musk a paedophile? Hey, just putting it out there, just asking the question.
Anyway, this has a context. For in July 2018, before a rapt audience of millions of his followers on Twitter, Musk referred to caver Vernon Unsworth as a “pedo guy”, then when challenged to prove it said simply: “Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true.” To a journalist, he then called Unsworth a “child rapist”.
Elon Musk loved Twitter so much, he bought the company … eventually.Credit: Bloomberg
Unsworth, rescuer of 12 boys trapped in a Thai cave system, had the temerity to dismiss Musk’s airy, vainglorious offers to assist with a submarine. Then – and this is the good bit – Musk subsequently defended a suit for defamation on grounds that his remarks were “not allegations of crimes but joking taunts in a fight between men”. So there: “pedo guy” became fair game.
Winning! And so the world’s best-known microblogging platform further endeared itself to the world’s richest man, until, in May 2022, Musk went the full Victor Kiam: he liked it so much, he bought the company, although not before trying quite strenuously not to buy the company, having realised after a beat it was probably worth nowhere near the $US44 billion ($66 billion) he first offered. Then, again assuming the guise of free-speech hero, he recommitted: “I did it to help humanity, which I love.”
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This forms the first, fast-paced and crisply reported, half of Character Limit; the second half, far darker, concerns how Musk diminished Twitter’s value by 90 per cent with his particular species of management, sacking most of its staff, and alienating most of its advertisers. “Go. F---. Yourselves,” he told them last year.
Musk was simultaneously rendering Twitter almost uninhabitable by shredding its moderation, thereby welcoming neo-Nazis, antisemites, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and their favoured president Donald Trump, not to mention fraudsters, impostors and child sex pedlars because ... freedom of speech!
Character Limit is not, however, about freedom of speech, which Musk so relentlessly trivialises, and cannot tolerate about himself. It concerns the impunity that wealth affords its holders.