Just when you thought it couldn’t get any stranger, a white South African male from Pretoria sticks his head above the clouds of social-media deception and delirium to declare he is the new messiah, bearing the gift of freedom of speech. But nothing is quite as it seems, and who can claim to know what really goes on in the fertile yet unexplored vastness that occupies the space between the ears of Elon Reeve Musk?
Long ago already he earned his place on the glittering motherboard of up-yours tech titans when he too dropped out of a university, says Wikipedia, leaving Tukkies after a few uneventful months and heading to the US to avoid conscription and study. Since then it’s been all upwards for Musk, the only person on Earth who can say with a straight face that “direct democracy’’ would be the best form of government on Mars.
Musk, as we’re told repeatedly, is the richest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at, and you can fill in the blank here because when you’re talking as much as he has figures hardly matter. He’s also very clever, a practical savant and, crucially, a media mega-phenomenon, the world’s most famous high roller, a Howard Hughes for our time. And he never lets his money do the talking.
Some bright spark on Twitter, I think, suggested Musk is not really as rich as you imagine he is because he doesn’t actually have a lot of cash. All views count, of course, but this is the sort of low-budget criticism you’d expect from a jealous person who has barely the data, let alone the information, to indulge in higher-order public discourse about the wealthy on Twitter. The poor think cash is wealth; the rich know that every cent in pocket is a cent’s worth of opportunity cost, or lost, or something like that.
Musk, like many of the rich, will hardly ever have any money on them. Or even cigarettes. I know this because when I joined the Sunday Times many years ago I was instructed, at very short notice, to warm a seat at the Business Times Top 100 businesspeople event at a concrete acropolis in Sandton. In a panic I went out and bought a suit (which I since gave to the gardener to avoid a repeat). Imagine my surprise when one of our richest men walked up to me outside the venue and asked for a cigarette. That’s how the rich are, often. For instance, I once had a well-paid deputy editor I’d not yet met when I joined that paper, who walked up to me in the newsroom and said: “Give me a cigarette or I’ll break your arm!”
The poor think cash is wealth; the rich know that every cent in pocket is a cent’s worth of opportunity cost, or lost, or something like that.
So I know to yield to the mighty on the cigarette front, and I think this Top-100 businessman sensed that, and he lingered and smoked two more of my cigarettes. He said something about his wife thinking he’d given up smoking. And that’s another thing with the rich. They’ve always got a good excuse to keep their hands out of their pockets. And sometimes in yours.
I’m glad for Musk, on a personal level anyway, that he’s bought Twitter. Every one of his successes is a body-blow to those who bullied him at school in SA. Bullying is to be deplored, the online version too, but it’s not that hard to see why he might have attracted a few slaps. Chirpy, irrepressibly optimistic, annoyingly Panglossian and blissfully full of himself, his cherubic countenance cries out “bliksem me hard!’’.
Like the sphinx without much of a secret, Musk cultivates his own enigma, saying generally dumb stuff and springing surprises on Twitter that wipe out poorer people’s savings and investments in Tesla shares with stupefying thoughtlessness. This all the more to encourage the one thing he wants you to think, which is that he doesn’t give a damn. He’s made a lot of people very rich. But he calls people boneheads, he’s been sued for racially discriminatory hiring practices and he called someone in the news “pedo guy’’ and got away with it. Musk claimed the term was common in SA when he was growing up (which was when?). In any event, deleting the tweet meant he “wasn’t serious’’, and a US jury agreed.
“My faith in humanity is restored,” Musk said afterwards, again proving he is truly the man who defied gravitas to come out on top.
Of course, too, there’s the little matter of money, and Musk knows how to make it. Twitter and its market reach are the foundation for vast numbers of businesses, not the least of which is Musk’s own Tesla empire whose shares rise and fall on his tweets. How will he leverage his new media asset?
Reach is only part of the media equation though. It’s not Twitter’s tech prowess alone that has made it a multibillion-dollar company; it’s the millions who use it because it’s a largely credible conveyor of unfiltered views and information, from individuals to companies and governments. If the people who mattered started to regard it predominantly as a cesspool of bigotry and hatred, many would tweet for a last time. Musk’s Twitter will be hemmed in to some extent by regulation, especially in Europe, so his goal of a global debating place on steroids will not necessarily be a free-for-all for twitchy fingers and malevolent, um, minds.
But there will be many who wonder whether Twitter’s role in advancing a broadly progressive social agenda and providing a platform for mobilising millions to support worthwhile and necessary global and local causes will continue. Others wonder whether Donald Trump will be allowed back.
Perhaps Musk is to be taken at his word, that freedom of speech on his Twitter will be that broad as to allow anything that does not constitute a crime. This would be a recognition, futuristic perhaps and even fanciful in the real world of regulation and social-media activism, that it’s near-impossible to police the internet. Harm, rather than offence and taste, would guide content regulation, which presumably would be lighthanded. Even then, there’d be no easy choices.
After a while in the hot seat, the world’s richest maverick may find himself wishing he’d stuck to rocket science.
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