Elon Musk Massive Fall in Public Standing Perfectly Illustrated By Immediate Success of Twitter Rival Threads

(Sipa via AP Images)

Has any figure fallen further or faster in public standing than Elon Musk has in recent months?

It’s stunning to think that just over a year ago, he was the world’s richest man that was seen as a swashbuckling entrepreneur eager to take over Twitter for an albeit ridiculous amount of money, all in a principled position to defend the First Amendment and appeal to a conservative base of users convinced that they were shadowbanned and Big Tech was out to get them!

Since then, we’ve learned a lot about the man, and not much of it is particularly charitable to his reputation.  First, his initial offer to purchase Twitter was an outrageously high $44 billion, which he later tried and failed to get out of.  Not long after, he noted that the value of the company he had just purchased was about half of what he paid for, which — and I’m no business guru — is NOT a good return on investment.

There is a lot of evidence that Musk’s reputation was well crafted and not earned. For a full detail of Musk’s full of shittery, please read Michael Luciano’s thorough takedown.

But the Elon Musk fans, fueled by repeated hagiography on conservative media outlets and Fox News hosts, said it didn’t matter. Musk bought the losing social media platform to save free speech, if not democracy itself!

Except that the deeper issues surrounding the deconstructionist and semiotics surrounding “truth and facts” and conversations about the ephemeral nature of meaning itself did not abate. Under Musk, blue checks became devalued in service to expertise as a get-rich-quick scheme that inadvertently made Twitter a much less reliable information service.

In an effort to ostensibly democratize the service and sell verified blue check subscriptions and tweak the Twitter algorithm, Musk added MORE noise to the signal. And Twitter Blue subscribers, convinced that they were being ignored or not followed because of conservative points of view, began to realize that the blue check they paid for didn’t make them Twitter famous. Or even get any engagement.

Then, of course, there are reports of his gutting his staff as a means to cut costs, but then the inevitably predictable declining of the platform integrity which led to a limit of views and the regretable trending of #RIPTwitter.

All of these moves made the platform way worse. And if reasonable people with critical minds needed more evidence of Musk’s curious perspective, he’s made abundantly clear by the alt-Right conspiracy morons he often amplifies with quote tweets and replies.

Does Elon Musk really believe the bullshit he amplifies? Hard to tell. I’ve long argued he’s more of a carnival barker eager to appeal to a conservative base to whom he can sell Tesla cars since the progressive audience seems saturated. But now I just think he’s a moron. And I’m not alone.

All of this comes in context to his chief rival (and potential cage match opponent) Mark Zuckerberg, who launched a direct competitor to Twitter Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. Within four hours, they were boasting 10 Million subscribers, which likely largely owes to the seamless integration with Instagram. It takes all of 30 seconds to get yourself a Threads account if you are already on Instagram.

Threads is not perfect — but it does feel a lot like Twitter, circa 2010, minus the regular appearance of the “fail whale.” But for this brief moment in time, at least, Threads feels like a safe haven from Twitter Blue subscribers dedicated to hectoring others or the massive amount of bots that feel left over from the GRU campaigns dedicated to unsettling and or confused by adding more noise to the signal.

It’s too early to write Twitter’s obituary and pronounce Musk its sole killer, but a lot of anecdotal evidence supports the notion that he has single-handedly made the Twitter experience worse. And as a result, Musk now looks like a complete and total buffoon.

Maybe that’s long been the case, and we are only now realizing that the emperor is not wearing clothes … made from golden threads.

The writer of this essay can be found on Threads at @mrcolbyhall and on Twitter at @colbyhall.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.