Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.
Old days
The upcoming book about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter includes a funny and thought-provoking anecdote about the billionaire’s first impressions when he first encountered the app.
In their upcoming book, “Character Limit,” New York Times authors Ryan Mack and Kate Conger write that Musk wasn’t a big fan of the site when his first wife, Justine Musk, first started using it.
When the serial entrepreneur’s wife encouraged him to join the site, Musk initially rejected it: Though Justin used the site “frequently,” according to a New York Times reporter’s notes, her husband seemed to think it was a waste of time.
Even after taking over the @ElonMusk account from an imposter in 2010 (this was before the days of Twitter’s original blue check verification system, which he later destroyed), Musk still seemed to make little use of the service.
“I don’t know if I can stomach writing 140-character messages,” the future Twitter user Musk wrote in a December 2011 post. Ironically, he added that he would post his “longer thoughts” to Google+, which was shut down in 2019. The jokes come naturally.
Turntable
Anyone who’s ever been addicted to Twitter knows that once you start tweeting, it’s hard to stop. That was apparently the case for Musk, who was tweeting all sorts of nonsense in late 2011. Soon after, as a New York Times reporter pointed out, the multitalented billionaire seemed to realize the power of Twitter and tried to use it for his own purposes.
As Conger and Mack report, Musk quickly discovered that Twitter allowed him to keep an increasingly enthusiastic fanbase updated on Tesla and SpaceX, and to control his own narrative in the face of an increasingly distrustful mainstream media. The rest, as they say, is history.
While this won’t be the first or last time the entrepreneur has radically changed his mind, Musk’s Twitter flip-flop is one of the most notable in the history of his famous flip-flops.
From ramping up Twitter usage in late 2011 to buying Twitter outright in 2022, the decade that followed was a time of huge growth for both Twitter and its eventual owners. And as their paths continued to overlap, it also came with it the demise of the OG Twitter we once knew and loved.
More on Musk’s about-face: After realizing his mistake, Elon Musk begged Twitter staff to turn off a new feature he was pushing.