Elon Musk: The Silliest, Most Desperate Moves He’s Made At Twitter So Far

It’s been such a colossal boondoggle, of almost epic proportions in the business world, that it might be hard to set down the silliest, most ridiculous moves that Elon Musk has made at Twitter since he showed up, kitchen sink in hand. While the financial media stays glued somehow to the “Musk is a visionary” story, the truth shouts otherwise.

Everybody loves a billionaire, of course: it’s the mountain top of capitalism, so financial journalists can’t wait to describe the exact nature of the genius at work. Unfortunately, whatever worked at Tesla for the South African-born Apartheid-era rich kid is not the right stuff in the social media world.

So now we see the “he’s playing 3-D chess” explanations as if mere humans could not possibly grasp how a person of Musk’s incredible vast powers achieves inevitable greatness at whatever he takes on. Once you’ve used the “visionary” word, it’s hard to let it go.

With all of that in mind, here are the 4 dumbest moments of Musk’s Twitter tenure thus far:

1. Paying $44 billion for the social media company is dumb when you consider that the company was worth much less than that. The “visionary” had tried to back out of the deal right up until the moment Twitter threatened to sue him and then he decided to avoid the lawsuits by agreeing to pay up. Genius at work, right?
2. He showed up as if he were Atilla the Hun issuing dire threats to workers who failed to show sufficient loyalty or who dared to leave the office before 3 am. It’s a brutal “I’m the boss” management style from the 1920s with a strong element of megalomania. Rather than inspire employees, Musk provides spectacle: “make sure the videographers catch me entering the door while I’m holding the deeply disturbing kitchen sink!”
3. He brought back Nazis to the site even as major advertisers began to withdraw citing uncertainty about where Musk was taking the site with his unusual version of “free speech.” Why would a well-known American name brand want its ad to appear next to Adolf Hitler-love? Answer: they wouldn’t.
4. He hired Matt Taibbi to conduct a lame, pathetic non-hit job on Hunter Biden. It’s almost as if Vladimir Putin himself had taken Musk and Taibbi through the Russian intelligence manual on the writing of obvious weak propaganda. That couldn’t possibly be true, of course.

The most noticeable lack of awareness by Musk, though, is the timing of this “breaking” news story: Friday night, after dinner. All wrong.

If you run a news desk and one of your reporters has been working on a big story and it’s ready to go, you put it on the front page on Monday morning. Or Tuesday morning. Any time, basically, other than late Friday night when folks are having drinks, smoking blunts and enjoying the latest Netflix
NFLX
special in their living rooms. Attention is elsewhere.

It’s stupid to “break” news on a Friday night — as anyone who’s worked on an actual news desk at a major media outlet can tell you. What Musk is displaying is his ignorance of the way real journalism works and no amount of forcing tech workers to stay past 1 am improves the problem.

This may seem small to some but it’s a window into how little Elon Musk grasps about journalism and social media. It’s not like making cars. He’s in over his head despite the billions.

Here’s the weekly price chart for Tesla (NASDAQ
NDAQ
: TSLA)

The stock peaked in late 2021 at $420 and now trades for $178. That’s a 57% drop in value. It’s almost as if the Tesla Chief Executive Officer has his mind elsewhere.

Not investment advice. For educational purposes only.