A week in tweets: Elon Musk doesn’t stop posting but what is he saying?
There is method to the apparent madness of the tycoon’s prolific 24-hour output
Elon Musk doesn’t stop tweeting. Over just seven days last week, he made nearly 650 posts to the social network he bought in November 2022 and half-heartedly rebranded as X. In addition, he spent nearly three hours battling through technical problems he would later attribute to an unproved hacking attack in order to host a “conversation” with Donald Trump, as well as livestreaming himself playing a couple of hours of Blizzard’s swords-and-sorcery game Diablo IV.
The sheer volume of his content would be impressive enough on its own, but even as someone so addicted to posting that he spent more than the budget of the Manhattan projectto buy the site, Musk’s consistency is alarming.
Over the course of the week of tweets analysed by the Guardian, there was one 90-minute period – between 3.00 and 4.29am local time – when he never posted. Every other half-hour period, night or day, he sent at least one tweet. He posted at 4.41am on a Saturday morning, at 2.30am on a Wednesday night, and at 11pm six days out of seven.
In that week, Musk’s longest continuous stretch without tweeting – with a different person, it might be safe to call this “bed time” – was just seven and a half hours, with a lie-in until 8.10am after a late-night posting session. His shortest overnight break, on Saturday night, saw him logging off after retweeting a meme comparing London’s Metropolitan police force to the Nazi SS, before bounding back online four and a half hours later to retweet a crypto influencer complaining about jail terms for Britons attending protests.
Wow, Woke, Cool
Not all of Musk’s content on X is rich with subtext. The vast majority of his posts are simple, one- or two-word replies to fans, followers and fellow travellers. “Cool,” he replies to a construction influencer posting an AI-generated picture of herself, two minutes before replying “Cool” to a montage of photos of a Tesla Cybertruck driving around North America, one minute after replying “💯” to an AI-generated cartoon of himself pointing at a sign reading: “On this platform, we love criticism.”
Sometimes a one-word reply is a mixed blessing: Musk, never one for conventional “netiquette”, will occasionally reply to a message with the “😂” emoji before copying it straight into his own feed without credit. Quite why some get a cherished Musk retweet and others get their post stolen and reposted is unclear.
Occasionally, Musk manages to be even more judicious in his praise, particularly from users he appears uneasy about agreeing with too loudly. Posts from End Wokeness about an early-release bill in California, from a Malaysian far-right influencer about a Haitian criminal, and from Libs of TikTok about another bill in California all get a simple “!!” from Musk. Others don’t even get that: a post from the far-right influencer Dom Lucre, whose suspension from the site for posting child abuse imagery Musk personally overturned in 2023, received just a single “!” from the billionaire.
Riots and Grok
Musk’s agitation over the UK riots seems to have deepened his association with the far right. Over the past week, he has struck up a conversation with the Canadian influencer Lauren Southern, one of three anti-Islam activists who were banned from entering the UK by Theresa May’s government in 2018. As well as chatting about their shared distrust of the media, Musk is now a paid subscriber to her feed, supporting her for £4.92 a month, as he does with more than 160 other users.
But there is method to Musk’s apparent madness. The showman that he is, the memes and chats he retweets and reposts are shot through with whatever he wants to promote that day. Sometimes, that is something professional: on Wednesday and Thursday after his AI company, xAI, released the latest version of its Grok large language model, a significant proportion of his posts were sharing quotes and images generated by it.
It’s 2030 in the UK & you’re being executed for posting a meme …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 10, 2024
And then there are the riots. In the working week, Musk’s attention wandered from the tension in the UK, but the constant drumbeat of sentencing over the weekend meant he was ready to engage in some mild rabble-rousing.
He latched on to the rightwing meme that Keir Starmer was promoting “two tier” policing, constantly drawing attention to the punitive sentences given to rioters while downplaying their involvement in violence. Early on Friday morning, he expanded his criticism to the SNP’s Humza Yousaf, calling the former Scotland first minister “super super racist” and daring him to sue in response.
Trump and Tesla
On Monday and Tuesday, Musk drew attention to his conversation with Donald Trump: sharing excited posts from fans in the run-up about how many people were likely to tune in and what the two smartest men in the world would discuss and then, after the livestream had ended, reposting aggrieved complaints about how the biased media were not writing positive headlines, and asking for fans to cut down the conversation to a more manageable hour-long highlights reel.
For all his friction, another side of Musk comes out when talking about his two largest companies, Tesla and SpaceX. For Tesla in particular, a publicly traded company, he has to be careful what he says. Musk has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, as well as legal obligations about how he can disclose material information. That came to a head when the SEC sued him over a notorious tweet in which he falsely claimed he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. In the ensuing settlement with the regulator, Musk agreed to have a lawyer review all his tweets about Tesla – a deal he has regretted ever since.
Yet even after appealing all the way to the supreme court, the deal stands, and Musk’s final chance to get free of the “Twitter sitter” was thrown out in April this year. And so his posts about Tesla are surprisingly measured: shortly after his conversation with Trump, he even posted a long statement that was almost normal, walking back some of his comments about climate change. “To be clear, I do think global warming is real,” he began, before explaining that all he had meant to imply was that even without global warming, high levels of CO2were dangerous.
‘The Guardian is trash …’
Musk also used the opportunity to take aim at another favoured target: the Guardian. After this paper quoted experts calling it “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”, Musk lashed out at others he followed who shared the article, telling the author Stephen King that the Guardian “cannot be considered as objective” and the entrepreneur Vinod Khosla that “the Guardian is trash”.
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