Elon Musk Is Not Playing Four-Dimensional Chess
Back in April, in response to the news that the Tesla and SpaceX founder was mulling an offer to buy Twitter, I argued that Elon Musk was a master of pseudo-events. “Musk commandeers the attention, legions speculate,” I wrote. “But ultimately we end up where we started. The only winner is Musk.”
It’s three months later, and we are, in so many ways, back where we started. Musk is trying to pull out of the deal, arguing through his lawyers that Twitter is not being cooperative and that he believes the platform is not being honest about the number of bots and spam accounts. If you’re interested in the particulars of Musk’s justifications and what the legal battle between Twitter and Musk might look like, you can read more at length about it here. But I’d like to talk about Elon Musk’s obsession with bots and how it actually illustrates the ways he is an extremely shallow thinker when it comes to online dynamics.
In short, Elon’s bot obsession is like Facebook-addled Boomer behavior.
Musk’s bot excuse is obvious bullshit. As Matt Levine over the weekend, “there is not a whisper of evidence [for the bot claim], no hint that there might be evidence, no acknowledgement that a reasonable reader of this letter might want to see evidence.” That said, Musk is clearly obsessed with the notion that Twitter is riddled with inauthentic
