Mick Clifford: Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter is a real-life horror worthy of Stephen King

Musk is just another wealthy man who has lost the run of himself. But his latest move could unleash further harm even worse than the flood of offensive content and the job losses

Stephen King's tweet about blue tick verification — and Elon Musk's extraordinary response to it — tell us a lot about the prospects for Twitter as a billionaire's social media vanity project. File picture: Scott Eisen/Getty

Elon Musk has a son by the name of X. He also had a daughter, who is an ex-Musk and, it’s fair to say, an ex-she, as he now has a new first name to reflect his gender identity and got rid of the surname because he no longer wanted to be a Musk.

The richest man in the world has a lot of other children, but last week he got delivery of his new baby, the social media platform Twitter.

The marriage of Musk and Twitter is one that could have been made in the imagination of horror writer Stephen King. Right now, the smart money says that Twitter and Musk are going to produce something that may be ugly, is bound to be contentious, and will probably end in messy disaster.

Like the best of King’s offerings, it will also retain the attention of the general public as it unfolds in compulsive, page-turning detail.

Notwithstanding Musk’s obvious brilliance in making money, it’s difficult to see how Twitter will be anything but a drain on his reputed €120bn. He paid €44bn for the platform, a fair whack in anyone’s language.

On Friday, he began firing up to half of the company’s 7,000 workers, including hundreds in Dublin. This was done before he even bothered to get a handle on who does what or what will happen if he just fires people to save money.

From the outside, this guy has the appearance of somebody who thinks he can commercially walk on water.

Yet another man losing the run of himself

Fate sometimes has a habit of parting large sums of money from wealthy people, mainly men, who lose the run of themselves. Money can just disappear down a black hole when perspective and common sense go walkabout.

Up to recently, the mega-rich often dallied in media by purchasing a newspaper publisher but nowadays the action is online so Elon Musk bought out Twitter including its European HQ in Dublin. Picture: Leah Farrell/RollingNews

This is not confined to tech billionaires. Take a staple of rural Ireland of old, the man who inherited a farm — or two — from a childless uncle. This stock character had no head for farming but a serious thirst, and thereafter he proceeded to drink the farm. For those not handicapped with a serious thirst such a feat may appear unbelievable. How could you drink a whole farm? Yet it has been done, again and again.

And the bad news for Musk is that you don’t need the assistance of alcohol to piss away a fortune, whether it be 30 acres of good land or a social media platform reaching out across the globe.

But first of all, why did he do it? Why would a man en route to Mars in his private space exploration, a man who invented a new class of motor car, a man who has proclaimed his mission is to better humankind, why would such an individual buy a social media platform bursting with anger but little history of turning a profit? (One might also ask why somebody who proclaims his love of humankind treats so many humans, including erstwhile Twitter employees, so badly?).

The answer is that he had little choice. 

Wealthy individuals, mainly men again, have historically been attracted to owning a media outlet. It feeds giant egos. It projects a sheen of glamour in a way that making zillions from manufacturing widgets or cars never will. It provides, to a greater or lesser extent, a platform on which you can publicly have acknowledged the brilliance of a mind that managed to make so much money in the first place.

Until recent years, the media outlet of choice was usually a newspaper. 

Wealthy men were always attracted to the medium, the sense of power it conveyed, the social standing of a proprietor, and the prospect of ascending to the status of media baron. Rarely, if ever, did they go into it to make money.

Elon Musk arriving at Twitter HQ in San Francisco on October 26 carrying a sink, seemingly to justify his punning tweet ('Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!') based on a joke he cracked in June. Picture: Twitter/AP

Today, all the action is online and for the aspiring media baron that is the place to go. Unlike the media baron of old, the social media ogre is not confined to just whispering in an editor’s ear but can write the headline, the lead story, and the editorial, all in the space of 140 characters. 

I’m dressing as a sink on Halloween, as they will have no choice but to let me in

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2022

“The bird is freed,” he tweeted after arriving at Twitter HQ to plant his flag. 

Later in the week, he retweeted a homophobic conspiracy theory about the vicious attack on Nancy Pelosi’s 80-year-old husband. Somebody must have had a word in his ear because he then deleted it. If this is an example of the Twitter bird spreading wings, then we’re all in big trouble.

Apart from just throwing people out of their jobs, Musk’s first week also provided a hint about his commercial nous. 

He announced that he was going to charge users $20 for a ‘blue tick’ account, which gives prominence to users with large numbers of followers, places their response high on the medium, and avoids some of the advertisements. One of the first people to respond to this was our old friend Stephen King, who has 6.9m followers.

 “$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me,” he tweeted. “If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Enron, some may recall, was an oil company that disappeared overnight because some of its top executives lost the run of themselves.

Anyway, Elon replied to the writer: “We need to pay the bills somehow!” he tweeted. “Twitter cannot entirely rely on advertisers. How about $8?” Later in the week, Musk announced that the blue tick account would cost $8 a month.

Just like that. 

A fiction writer told him where to deposit his offer of 20 bucks and the tech billionaire just caved. With such an approach to business, Twitter's fortunes are likely to go just one way.

Next up, watch as standards drop as content moderators are fired and trolls come out to play. 

According to The Washington Post, use of the N-word on the platform increased by 500% the day after Musk took over. He has also hinted that he will readmit Donald Trump who was thrown off Twitter for spreading lies.

In his desperate grab for cash, there is little doubt but that Elon will welcome back The Donald in the hope that he still has enough star wattage to convince at least some advertisers to return before the whole thing goes down in flames.

King is no doubt already sharpening the edges of his plot, having already written in a walk-on part for himself.

Sit tight and let’s just hope this is not a portent of things to come in world that has already gone halfway crazy.