The craziness of people with too much money

Billionaire Elon Musk has taken Twitter, a US$44bil company, and dragged it down 90% to an estimated US$4bil. That's just crazy, isn't it? — Bloomberg

Elon Musk continues to flap his gums on the social media platform he bought, and is currently in the process of redesigning it, which is really a euphemism for destroying.

In November 2023, American media watchdog group Media Matters alleged that X (formerly Twitter) had run ads for big companies next to posts supporting Neo-Nazis. Understandably companies began pulling their advertising from the platform. Coca-Cola, IBM, Apple and, finally, Disney were among the big companies that didn’t want their products associated with hate of any kind.

At a recent appearance Musk was asked about this situation and he replied: “If somebody has been trying to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go (expletive) yourself.

Reaction to this on Threads (Facebook’s version of Twitter) and X were wildly different: On Threads, every responsible adult saw this as Musk spiralling in real time, being a man child. Among the man’s fanboys on X, Musk was hailed as a “legend” and “a real hero”.

All for misusing the term blackmail.

Let’s be clear, blackmail is the act of coercively obtaining something of value, such as money or services, from an individual by threatening to reveal damaging or compromising information about him/her.

In this case, Musk already revealed the damaging material about himself, which was, basically, him promoting hate speech on his platform, and was upset that advertisers decided they wanted nothing to do with it.

That’s not blackmail. That’s just business.

Companies like Disney or Apple deciding they don’t want to be associated with the toxic hate speech that goes on on a platform like X is just their business. They have family brands. It makes sense they don’t want to be part of the hatefest that is Musk-owned Twitter. But of course, for Musk it’s all about him.

Ben Mezrich, author of Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History, said on the Motley Fool Money podcast recently that Musk believes we live in a computer simulation and that he is Player One. Which means he doesn’t need to play nice, he’s supposed to push the envelope, this is his game, you, me, your family, everyone exists just on the off chance Musk might one day show up.

And being one of the world’s richest men does give some credence to the idea that Musk is Player One. With that much money, he can do what he wants. Much more than normal people can. And he does.

But whatever Musk was before, smart, innovative, inspiring, it seems we’re past all that.

Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says something that can kill a company is overconfident leaders. And he cites Musk and X as the saga of an overconfident leader playing out right before us.

So back to Musk. After telling Disney’s CEO Bob Iger specifically and the rest of the corporate world to go eff themselves, he said, “That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”

Now that sounds a little like the kid on the playground that no one wants to play ball with, and then he cusses everyone out and says, “I don’t wanna play ball anyway!”

Musk followed later with this: “What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company, and the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.”

This also feels like a lot of finger-pointing away from himself because he doesn’t want to accept the truth. He took Twitter, a recognisable world brand – tweet became a verb even – and renamed it because he’s got a cringey 1990s era fascination with the letter X (his aerospace company is SpaceX, remember?).

He destroyed the credibility of the blue check mark to gain a middling subscription revenue. And through his inane tweets and lack of safety rails, hate speech on the platform is allegedly up and no one wants any part of it.

Elon Musk took a US$44bil (RM205bil) company and dragged it down 90% to an estimated US$4bil (RM19bil).

We deserve a better Player One.

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Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.