Elon Musk's X: Twitter's Wildest Moments of 2023
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Elon Musk killed Twitter in 2023 in name and, to many, in spirit.
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Musk, the world’s richest person, says he overpaid in swinging the $44 billion deal for Twitter last year — which he rechristened X and has refashioned into his vision of what a “free speech” platform should be. The obstreperous Musk, after hacking X/Twitter’s workforce down to a skeleton crew, drove major advertisers away from X after he endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory. (Musk expressed regret about his comment, but also told Bob Iger and others who pulled ad spending to “go fuck yourself.”) And, among other wacky stunts, he manufactured a bizarre feud with Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s tough to narrow down the 10 truly wackiest moments of Musk’s monarchical reign over X/Twitter this year, but here goes.
Musk Tells Disney and Other Fleeing Advertisers: ‘Go Fuck Yourself’
On Nov. 15, Musk wrote on X, “You have said the actual truth,” replying to someone on X who evoked the white-nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” At the New York Times’ DealBook conference two weeks later, Musk accused advertisers who pulled ads from X over his remark of “blackmail.” “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear?” Musk said. He called out Disney CEO Bob Iger, who earlier at the conference had said the tech mogul’s comment made a partnership with X “not necessarily a positive one for us.” Asked about Iger’s remarks, Musk said, “Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience, that’s how I feel — don’t advertise.”
Musk apologized for the post (which the White House condemned as “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate”) and insisted he’s not antisemitic, saying that what he intended to mean is that persecuted groups funded by Jewish organizations were calling for attacks on Jewish people and that “it’s unwise to support groups that want your annihilation.” But despite X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s attempts at damage control, there’s no sign advertisers like Disney, Apple, IBM, Lionsgate or others will be coming back. (Musk’s “You have said the actual truth” comment remains on X.)
The advertiser exodus from X also followed reports by activist group Media Matters that found ads appeared next to pro-Nazi and white nationalist posts on the platform. Musk in turn sued Media Matters, alleging the group “knowingly and maliciously manufactured” the data in a “blatant smear campaign”; Media Matters said it “stands behind its reporting and looks forward to winning in court.”
Musk Challenges Zuckerberg to Cage Match
Just a normal beef between billionaire bros with raging egos. The feud started when Musk responded to a June 20 Twitter thread mocking Zuckerberg, with Musk writing, “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.” That was in response to a user saying Zuckerberg “does the ju jitsu now,” a reference to his medaling in a Brazilian jiujitsu tournament. Zuckerberg fired back the same day in an Instagram Story with a screenshot of Musk’s cage-match tweet and the caption, “Send Me Location.” Musk at one point suggested “a literal dick-measuring contest” between the two men. Italian officials even expressed interest in a hosting a charity cage match between the two.
Note that Musk was pissed about Meta’s launch of Twitter-copycat Threads and threatened to sue the rival, alleging Meta had hired “dozens” of Twitter employees and had misappropriated “Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” (Meta disputed the claims, saying no one on the Threads team had worked at Twitter.)
Were either of them actually serious about an MMA brawl? It seems like Zuckerberg was — but that Musk was just trolling. After claiming the fight would be held in Italy, Musk wrote on Twitter, “Dulce est desipere in loco,” a quote from Horace’s “Odes” that has been translated as, “It is delightful to play the fool occasionally.”
By August, after calling Musk’s bluff, Zuck said it was “time to move on.” “I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, noting he had “offered a real date” for a fight which Musk wouldn’t confirm. In response, Musk claimed he would use a beta version of Tesla’s Full-Self Driving feature to ferry him over to Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto estate and that if Zuck “actually answers the door, the fight is on!” (A Meta rep said Zuckerberg would not “fight someone who randomly shows up at his house.”)
Musk Kills the Twitter Brand and Its Adorable Blue Bird
Musk told everyone he was going to change Twitter into X, “the everything app,” in early October 2022 before he officially closed the debt-laden deal. Then in a late-night post in July, he declared by fiat that Twitter would be no more — reborn as X, his favorite letter of the alphabet. “Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk wrote on July 23. To celebrate, he installed a blindingly bright “X” sign on top of the company’s building in San Francisco but was forced by the city to take it down after complaints, including that the “extremely intense white stroboscopic light” was “causing distress and nausea.”
Our HQ in San Francisco tonight pic.twitter.com/VQO2NoX9Tz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Donald Trump, Kanye and Alex Jones Return to X/Twitter
Musk, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” said X/Twitter would grant “amnesty” to all suspended accounts and reinstate them (“provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam”). After Musk reinstated the account of Donald Trump — who had been permanently banned by Twitter on Jan. 8, 2021, for his role in the Jan. 6 deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol — Trump has posted on the platform exactly once: In August, he shared his mugshot and wrote, “Never Surrender!”, after surrendering to law enforcement officials in Fulton County, Ga., on charges related to alleged attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.
Musk has allowed others back on X whom he had previously banned or said would not be allowed on the platform. Musk booted Kanye “Ye” West from Twitter in December 2022 after the rapper shared an image of a Nazi swastika embedded inside the Star of David. At the time, Musk said West’s account was suspended for “incitement to violence.” But in July, Musk reinstated him after Ye reportedly promised to refrain from posting antisemitic and other hateful content.
And in December, Musk took a poll of his followers to ask if Alex Jones should be reinstated, following Twitter’s 2018 ban on the right-wing conspiracy theorist over hate-speech and harassment violations. Surprise! A majority of Musk’s poll respondents thought Jones should be allowed back on X, and Musk complied. That was a reversal of Musk’s position a year earlier when he rejected user calls to consider reinstating Jones. Referring to Jones’ horrible lies about the Sandy Hook school mass shooting, Musk had written in November 2022, “My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
Twitter Botches Ron DeSantis’ Presidential Campaign Announcement
Ron DeSantis was hoping to make a social-media splash by using Twitter to officially broadcast his 2024 run for U.S. president. But Twitter’s failure to deliver became the takeaway headline: The Florida governor’s Twitter Spaces live audio session crashed multiple times and DeSantis’ press conference was delayed by almost 30 minutes. “The servers are straining somewhat,” Musk could be heard saying on the livestream. “I think we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign,” said moderator David Sacks, a venture capitalist and friend of Musk. When it was over, DeSantis gamely remarked, “We should do it again.”
Musk Moves to Charge to Post on X/Twitter
Musk says he’s in favor of free speech — but on X, the ability to exercise free speech is going to cost money. In September, Musk said X/Twitter is “moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system,” which he claimed is necessary to thwart bots flooding the platform. In October, the company launched a test to charge users $1 per year to post to the platform. Going forward, Musk explained, X will be free to read “but $1/year to write.”
Linda Yaccarino’s Awkward Role as Musk Defender
Musk convinced Linda Yaccarino to quit her job as NBCUniversal’s head of ad sales to run X/Twitter as CEO, overseeing business operations. But all too often she’s found herself in triage mode to try to contain the damage done by her boss. When Musk told some of X’s biggest advertisers to “go fuck yourself” after they suspended ad spending over a post widely seen as antisemitic, Yaccarino tried to explain what Musk meant by his “explicit point of view about our position.” X, she said, is “enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people” and, hoping to reduce further advertiser flight from the platform, thanked “our partners who believe in our meaningful work.”
Meanwhile, Yaccarino has at times appeared to be out of the loop: At Vox Media’s Code 2023 conference in September, Yaccarino was asked by interviewer Julia Boorstin of CNBC about Musk’s plan to charge a fee for all users of X — and whether he had consulted her before announcing it. Yaccarino seemed caught off guard and unaware of Musk’s public announcement on the topic a week earlier; she dodged the question, while also insisting, “We talk about everything.” When Boorstin asked whether she was in a “placebo role as CEO in name only,” Yaccarino replied, “Not nice.” “Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?” Yaccarino asked rhetorically. Who, indeed?
Musk Yanks Twitter’s Verified Check Marks, Then Restores Many of Them
Musk taketh away and Musk giveth back. In April, he enacted a purge of Twitter’s “legacy” verified accounts — after disparaging the previous verification policy as “corrupt and nonsensical” — removing blue check marks of users including Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Bill Gates, Justin Timberlake, Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé. Supposedly, anyone who wanted a blue check mark would need to subscribe to Twitter Blue (now called X Premium), which costs $8/month and up. However, within a few days, Twitter had restored the check marks for high-profile celebrities, including for those who said they weren’t paying the fee (as well as for several who are dead). What happened? It seems that Musk realized (or was informed) that X/Twitter accounts with huge followings generate a tremendous amount of traffic for the site, and that yanking the verified status of the biggest celebs threatened to derail that by causing a new round of confusion over the authenticity of the accounts.
X/Twitter’s Value Plummets by More Than Half
In late October, just over a year after Musk (begrudgingly) closed the Twitter deal, X notified employees eligible for stock grants that they would receive shares at a valuation of $19 billion, down more than 50% from the transaction’s original value. Advertising revenue has plunged as much as 60% (according to Musk himself), amid ongoing concerns about hate speech and misinformation — which the aforementioned controversy over Musk’s thumbs-up of an antisemitic post on X has not helped to reverse. At this point, banks that extended roughly $13 billion in loans to Musk for the Twitter takeover (including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays) are facing significant losses on the debt if or when they try to sell it, after Musk made guarantees they wouldn’t lose money, per the Financial Times.
Twitter Changes Logo to Dogecoin Mascot
In April, Musk for a few days swapped out the Twitter logo with the Shiba Inu “doge” mascot of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Because… that was super-funny, at least according to Musk, who seems to think of himself as a comedian. To others, it was evidence that Musk sees X/Twitter as his own personal plaything.
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