It was by no means inevitable that the biggest news announcement of the year would be posted on X. When President Biden resigned on July 21 by sharing a letter on the Elon Musk-owned social platform, he turned American politics upside down.
But Biden also acknowledged something else: Nearly two years on from the acquisition, Musk’s jaw-dropping $44bn (£34.2bn) gamble to turn Twitter into X has not diminished the site’s fundamental importance. Stories that make the nightly news headlines and front pages around the world still usually appear first on X.
Nearly two years ago, in an unprecedented move, Mr. Musk took control of one of the world’s leading sites for political and cultural discussion. Companies the size of Twitter are typically acquired by other companies, not by individuals. And the day Mr. Musk bought Twitter, obituaries began being written.
Few people thought the Twitter-addicted Musk really understood what he was getting himself into. “You totally screwed up,” was how Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the influential technology news site The Verge, greeted Musk’s purchase of the “disaster clown car company.”
Stories of dysfunction and mass layoffs have emerged from the company’s San Francisco headquarters. And by traditional business metrics, Musk’s acquisition has indeed been a notable disappointment. Advertising revenue fell to $2.5 billion last year, down nearly 50% from $4.7 billion in the previous four quarters. As of February 2024, daily users of X’s app in the U.S. have fallen 23% since November 2022.
As Musk’s deal moves forward in 2022, an investor presentation was leaked to The New York Times, in which the billionaire’s highly ambitious goals included a five-fold increase in revenue and a target of 931 million users by 2028. Both targets are far from being met.
So is his bet failing? In some ways, it seems. But in fact, this wasn’t just about business. Musk’s core goal was to break the liberal stranglehold on free speech and public debate in the United States and around the world. “Free speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where issues of critical importance to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said at the time.
Last week, Musk revealed an even deeper motivation for his campaign against liberal bigotry and excesses: In a special podcast interview with culture warrior Jordan Peterson, Musk explained that he had “vowed to eradicate the virus of woke mind” after his son went through the process of becoming a transgender woman.
He called his son’s gender reassignment surgery “child mutilation and sterilization,” saying, “I was essentially tricked into signing papers for one of my older sons. Essentially, I lost a son.”
On Thursday, Vivian Jenna Wilson, 20, Musk’s former son Xavier, hit back at her father, accusing him of absenteeism in interviews and of bullying and harassment due to her “femininity and queerness.”
Musk told Peterson he thinks he’s “making some progress” in his mission to defeat the ideology that supposedly drove him apart from his son — a mission centered around the Twitter takeover. So it seems that Musk is indeed succeeding to some extent. The public sphere is starting to look a lot like Musk, with its chaos, its wildness, its humor and its freedom.
Liberal Free Competition
X, and Twitter before it, have always had a smaller user base than Facebook and TikTok, currently at about 251 million active users worldwide. But Twitter still dominates public discourse, as evidenced by Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign. It’s home to journalists, politicians, campaigners and just about anyone who wants to influence and shape the political debate.
“It’s amazing what we’re seeing,” said Bruce Daisley, who served as Twitter’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa from 2012 to 2020. Daisley was Twitter’s most senior executive in London but is no fan of Musk. But he acknowledged that at least one thing hasn’t changed since the Tesla and SpaceX tycoon completed his purchase of his former employer in October 2022.
“If you’re interested in breaking news, you can’t ignore Twitter,” he said. “Twitter remains unmatched. The speed of the platform is unmatched.”
But the atmosphere on this platform is undoubtedly different. X is a stranger, darker place than Twitter used to be, whose previous owners performed a painful balancing act between freedom and censorship, harm and safety. This is a question that poses itself to any responsible owner of a communications platform with hundreds of millions of users.
Musk has tossed these delicate and often contentious trade-offs like a windshield shutter through a window. Old-fashioned liberal balancing has been replaced by freewheeling libertarian experimentation. Nearly everything from race science to hardcore pornography now appears on X, no doubt shying away from many advertisers.
Bruce Daisley, who served as Twitter’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa until 2020, said X’s speed is unmatched.
Times photographer Richard Paul
Some A-list stars, including Gigi Hadid and Sir Elton John, have left Musk’s new platform, but few people from politics or the media have left for good since the acquisition, despite numerous threats from high-profile users posting on X.
Tech platforms that offer Twitter-like services (Instagram threads, Substack notes, Mastodon toots, Bluesky skeets) have built user bases but can’t seem to steal X’s political dominance. It has more visitors than users. Meta, which owns Instagram, has eschewed political content on its site. “X has become the only option when it comes to politics,” said a source familiar with Musk’s thinking.
X’s competitors have struggled to generate the network effects that drive the success of social media platforms. “‘I hate Elon’ isn’t enough momentum to sustain a new social product,” the source added. The platform was too entrenched to quit.
But X now has a different impact on the world than it used to: rather than reinforcing existing conventional wisdom, it tends to fuel powerful conspiracy theories and wacky meme-driven obsessions.
Daisley says the Duchess of Cambridge’s disappearance from public view earlier this year was one story fueled by X’s new algorithms that feed people a kind of dark cultural mishmash, rather than content from people they actually choose to follow. “The technology is really [Kate] “This story has an overwhelming momentum,” Daisley says.
Gazing into the abyss
Musk was an avid Democratic donor during the Obama administration and once stood in line for six hours to shake the president’s hand.
But once a huge Obama fan, he appears to have become a supporter of Donald Trump.
In his campaign to eradicate the “woke mind virus,” Musk is ensuring that Trump supporters have more freedom to operate. Regular users will also be aware that white supremacists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes thrive on X.
Controversial figures whose accounts have been reinstated by Musk include Trump, who continues to post regularly on his Truth Social account, Peterson, British far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson, and men’s rights influencer Andrew Tait, who is currently awaiting trial in Romania on rape and human trafficking charges. (Former Cuban dictator Raul Castro remains banned.) This, plus changes to Twitter’s algorithm that have altered the posts users see (videos often made on TikTok are now more prominent), have contributed to a shift in tone on Twitter.
“Twitter is at the forefront of the meme battlefield,” said a source familiar with Musk’s thinking. “If you win X, you win the narrative. Elon has basically rid Twitter of left-wing bias.”
Since the acquisition, Musk’s own status on the platform has grown. By February 2023, @elonmusk was the most followed account on X; he now has 191 million followers. His role on X now is roughly similar to that of Donald Trump under the previous owners: he is the site’s instigator, antagonist, and end-level boss character.
Culture warrior Jordan Peterson is one of the controversial figures who brought back X-accounts.
Rex
Critics were and still are terrified: They claim that Mr Musk has remade Twitter in his own image, turning it into a meme factory; The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel described it under Musk as “a far-right social network.”
A source close to Musk believes these critics are letting their “personal animosity towards Elon cloud the fact that the platform is thriving.” Thriving is highly subjective, but it seems the world is leaning toward Musk. “He’s deliberately molded the platform in his own image,” Daisley says.
But X isn’t entirely dominated by racist rhetoric and radical incels; there’s still plenty of left-wing momentum on the platform. One of the big controversies on the platform this week was a post that jokingly claimed Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance once wrote an article about having sex with a rubber glove stuffed between the couch cushions.
This sparked a flurry of liberal jokes and insults aimed at Vance, culminating in an Associated Press fact-check with a story headlined “J.D. Vance Isn’t Having Sex With Couches.” This critical mass of diverse opinions about X is what Daisley calls the “magic ingredient” behind its resilience. This little incident with Vance also epitomized Musk’s X: distracting, vulgar, and crude.
But perhaps the biggest divide created by Musk’s X acquisition is the one between those who spend hours scrolling through the site, primarily its strange cocktail of cruelty and stupidity, and those who spend their days free from couch sex memes, summaries of theories of race and IQ, and scattered clips of Latin porn.
The former might be wise to take a page from Friedrich Nietzsche, who Musk once said “drew me from my depths” as a teenager: “If you stare long enough into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you,” the German philosopher once wrote.