Ban them, now un-ban them: At Twitter, Elon Musk is consistent about his inconsistency

Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, to set speech free at an eye-watering $44 billion, is turning colicky. In a move characteristic of his theatrics, the social media platform silenced a few accounts which Musk claimed tracked his movements making him a target for terror attacks. Musk watchers have called him a hypocrite. In truth, he is only being consistent about his inconsistency.

A dithering Elon Musk is easy to chronicle because it is so public. Just a few weeks after he announced the bid to buy Twitter, he declared he was pulling out. Twitter sued him to complete the deal. He went on a blistering sacking spree, then recalled some of the employees to work saying they were ‘critical talent’. A few days on, after announcing he was done with the layoffs at Twitter, he sacked a few more. Reports suggest that after taking Twitter private, Musk is now looking for investors.

In short, Musk is a man in a hurry, and between pot-puffing, Mars-colonising, twitter-polling escapades, he swings wildly from decision to decision.

What makes Musk dangerous is that his erratic behaviour, so completely out of character with the staid corporate rhetoric that we are used to, makes him an object of curiosity and fatal attraction. A dark knight stamping out the world’s biggest problems, riding roughshod over corporate slick, seems a somewhat heroic figure.

Trouble with that view is that it couches ruthless ambition, in the guise of universal good. Musk’s solution to fossil-fuel pollution is setting up Giga factories to make cars, albeit electric, that are mostly charged with electricity from - fuels. Of course, one could argue he countered that with the purchase of SolarCity, so consumers could get clean energy from solar panels and be their own utility provider. But that’s not how everyone is charging their Tesla. Clean-energy charging is still very low among Tesla customers.

Besides, once Musk has populated the planet with more cars, he plans to ease the congestion they cause by building high-speed undercity tunnels for transportation – The Boring Company.

We all know it would be a lot greener to not commute and work from home, if we are not necessarily needed on-site. Turns out, Musk abhors the idea of work from home and wants everyone in office unless they face logistical challenges in getting to work. Worse, he wants them to clock all the hours God gives them, or preferably more. This is perhaps a man who is not that deeply concerned about the fallout of carbon emissions and commutes, if it helps him sell more Teslas and promote his projects.

And thus, after we have spent our dollars on his cars, paid him a bit more to use his tunnels and then exploited everything on earth, we can count on him to send us to Mars on his Space X shuttles. To save humans on earth, it seems we must start on Mars. And wait, you can sometimes buy a Tesla, get yourself a ride on SpaceX with cryptocurrency - but only when @Elonmusk has set the value of the currency with his tweets on it.

All this shows is that Musk has a hypnotic ability to manipulate vast swathes of believers. The latest kerfuffle is that Musk banned the handles of several journalists from prominent news outlets and a young adult who was tracking Musk’s private jet. He called it ‘doxxing’ his location. Both the European Union and the United Nations, unable to prevent the Russian-Ukrainian war, have weighed in, threatening sanctions against Musk. In the meantime, Musk indulged Twitterati with a poll on whether he should reinstate the accounts, and has agreed to give in to their verdict.

Our belief in Twitter as more a platform of free speech, and less a business, and therefore our disappointment with Musk, is because we have erroneously assumed it to be a force more egalitarian and democratic than governments. A benign platform controlled by us, the people.

Large corporations grow large by working with agencies in power, not against them. It’s always been that way. Twitter's promise of free speech is controlled by algorithms we do not code, nor have any real say over. They will always be open to manipulation. Time and again, whistle-blowers have shown how platforms from Meta to Twitter have acted on nudges from vested interests to subvert what we see on our feed.

Musk’s folly is he is combative and in-the-face. Mistaking that as a sign of great social change means we are on some of the stuff he was smoking on the Joe Rogan show, only a stronger version of it.

We are most likely better off using our energy fixing real problems, not the ones Musk has sold us.