pictureRon Musk isn’t stopping tweeting. In just seven days last week, he made nearly 650 posts on the social network he bought in November 2022 and reluctantly rebranded as X. He also spent nearly three hours wrestling with technical issues in what he would later conclude was the result of an unproven hacking attack while trying to host a “conversation” with Donald Trump, and livestreamed himself playing Blizzard’s sword-and-sorcery game Diablo IV for several hours.
The volume of his content alone is impressive enough, but even for someone who was so into posting that he spent more money on a site than the Manhattan Project budget, Musk’s consistency is astonishing.
In the week of tweets analysed by The Guardian, there was a 90-minute period when he posted nothing, between 3am and 4:29am local time, but he tweeted at least once every other half hour throughout the day and night: at 4:41am on Saturday morning, 2:30pm on Wednesday night, and at 11pm on six of the seven days.
The longest Musk went without tweeting that week was seven and a half hours, when he slept until 8:10 a.m. after a late-night posting session. On Saturday night, Musk logged out after retweeting a meme likening the Metropolitan police to the SS, then returned online four and a half hours later to retweet a tweet from a cryptocurrency influencer complaining about the prison sentences of British protesters.
Awesome, awakened, cool
Not all of Musk’s posts on X are loaded with meaning. Most are simple one- or two-word replies to fans, followers and allies. Two minutes after he replies “Cool” to a construction influencer’s AI-generated photo of himself, he replies “Cool” to a montage of photos of the Tesla Cybertruck driving through North America, and a minute later an AI-generated cartoon of himself points to a sign that reads “Criticism is welcome on this platform” and replies “💯.”
One-word replies can sometimes be a good thing and a bad thing. Musk, who has never been one to follow traditional “online etiquette,” occasionally replies to messages with a “😂” emoji and then copies the exact same thing to his own feed without credit. It’s unclear why some posts get Musk’s treasured retweets while others get stolen and reposted.
Musk is sometimes careful with his praise, especially when it comes from users he’s not comfortable being too vocal about. An End Wokeness post about a California early release bill, a Malaysian far-right influencer’s post about Haitian criminals, and a Libs of TikTok post about another California bill have all been marked with a simple “!!” by Musk, while a post by Dom Lucre, a far-right influencer who was banned from the site for posting child abuse imagery, doesn’t even get that mark. Personally covered In 2023, I received just one “!” from a billionaire.
Riot and Grok
Musk’s outrage over the UK riots seems to be deepening his ties to the far-right: Over the past week, he has begun a conversation with Canadian influencer Lauren Southern, one of three anti-Muslim activists named in the UK riots. Banned from entering the UK It was launched by Theresa May’s government in 2018. Though the pair share a distrust of the media, Musk is now a paying subscriber to her feed, supporting her – along with more than 160 other users – for £4.92 a month.
But Musk’s crazy behavior makes sense. A showman, the memes and chatter he retweets and reposts are full of promotions he wants to make that day. Sometimes, it’s professional. On Wednesday and Thursday, when his AI company xAI released the latest version of its large-scale language model, Grok, a significant percentage of his posts were sharing quotes and images generated by it.
In the UK in 2030, you could be executed for posting a meme…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 10, 2024
And then there are the riots. During the week, Musk’s attention was diverted from tensions in the UK, but the spate of rulings handed down over the weekend meant he was primed for a bit of mayhem.
He latched onto right-wing memes about Keir Starmer promoting a “two-tier” policing system and downplayed their contribution to the violence while constantly drawing attention to the punitive sentences given to rioters. Early on Friday morning, he expanded on his criticism of the SNP's Humza Yousaf, calling the former Scottish First Minister a “super super racist” and challenging him to take legal action in response.
Trump and Tesla
On Monday and Tuesday, Musk drew attention to his conversation with Donald Trump, sharing posts before the livestream in which fans excitedly wondered how many people would tune in and what the two smartest people in the world would discuss, then reposting posts after the livestream in which fans were upset that biased media wouldn’t write more positive headlines and asking fans to shorten the conversation into a more manageable hour-long highlights reel.
But after an appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, the deal remains valid, meaning Musk’s final chance to escape the “Twitter guards” may be… It was scrapped in April this year.His posts about Tesla have been surprisingly muted. Shortly after his conversation with Trump, he posted a lengthy, mostly standard, statement retracting some of his comments about climate change: “To be clear, I believe global warming is real.” He startedWhat he meant was that even without global warming, high levels of CO2 It was dangerous.
“Guardians are trash…”
Musk also used the opportunity to take aim at another favorite target, The Guardian. After the paper quoted experts in what he called “the dumbest climate change debate in history,” Musk slammed others he follows who shared the article, telling author Stephen King that “The Guardian cannot be considered objective” and entrepreneur Vinod Khosla that “The Guardian is rubbish.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
