How Elon Musk’s Buffoonery Misleads His Critics
If you’re captivated when people who draw out the worst in one another can’t bring themselves to decouple, forget about Ryan and Kelly on The Office, Gossip Girl’s Chuck and Blair, and most every pairing on Euphoria and start watching the latest season of Twitter.
Its new lead is the billionaire Elon Musk, the social-media platform’s owner and CEO. And although he’s enmeshed in several fraught relationships––with Twitter’s presumably beleaguered workforce and its understandably anxious advertisers, for starters––Musk’s entry into the love-hate relationship between Twitter and left-of-center journalists is easily the most captivating and dysfunctional plotline. Is it a love triangle? A toxic polycule? I want happy endings for all the participants. I want Musk to succeed in creating a thriving conversation space with a culture of free speech, and I want journalists to succeed in subjecting Musk-era Twitter to rigorous scrutiny.
[Helen Lewis: Elon Musk’s brutally honest management style]
But as I binge on this show, I find that—as when watching The White Lotus or —I am not rooting for who is right, but against whoever is most exasperatingly wrong in any given spat. As episodes unfold, I can’t honestly defend of anyone’s actions. In their ongoing zeal to advance competing culture-war narratives about Twitter as a platform, Musk and his media critics routinely succumb to excesses that undermine faith in them.
