It wouldn’t be the holidays without more chaos from billionaire internet troll Elon Musk.
Back in 2022, Musk made end-of-the-year headlines after he banned several journalists from Twitter, the online juggernaut he purchased for $44 billion earlier that year, for publishing unflattering tweets about his erratic management style. After a brief standoff in which Musk played the aggrieved victim, he ultimately relented and unbanned the journalists who so unforgivably offended him..
Not to be outdone, Musk ended 2023 with a flurry of new headlines about how his erratic management style was damaging not only Twitter, now “X,” but his other businesses as well. According to Fidelity, one investor in Musk’s social media gambit, the company is now worth just a fraction of its purchase price (and that’s assuming Musk could find a buyer for his tattered, unreliably functional mess).
One thing can be said for Elon Musk: the guy works fast. He’s managed to lose 71 percent of X’s value in just over a year, while alienating major brands and mainstreaming a 105 percent surge in neo-Nazi and antisemitic hate speech — an explosion of unmoderated hatred without precedent on any other major social network.
Now it looks like Musk’s financial hangover has finally arrived.
It’s no secret that X is in financial disarray. Musk himself has often alluded to the real possibility of declaring bankruptcy unless the platform can replace its evaporating advertising revenue. Most of that money is likely gone forever, after Musk’s targeted bullying of advertisers, with Musk at one point urging the companies who keep his lights on to “go f*ck yourself.” Despite goofy schemes including wanting to turn X into a bank and charging users for verified checkmarks, Musk hasn’t come close to replacing that lost revenue.
What’s clear is that Musk’s focus on X is now costing his other, more successful companies real money. That’s mainly because Musk is known to be increasingly fixated on beating his online haters, even if it takes him away from regular management of previous pet projects like Tesla. That’s reflected pretty clearly in the automaker’s disastrous year of absentee management.
Despite barely hitting his goal of shipping 1.8 million vehicles in 2023, Musk’s Tesla is in real structural trouble. The company was forced to recall nearly all of its 2 million vehicles after revealing the car’s autopilot and driver awareness systems don’t actually work as promised. Initially, Musk claimed ignorance. A Florida judge disagreed, ruling that Musk and other executives knew about the Autopilot flaw but decided against taking action.
The company also landed itself in hot water with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for creating a culture of what the EEOC alleges to be “widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees” and punishing employees who speak up. The EEOC sued Tesla in September, adding yet another case to Musk’s mounting courtroom dance card.
According to the EEOC’s filing, it was commonplace for Black employees at Teslas to face slurs including “monkey,” “boy,” and several too offensive to print. They encountered swastika graffiti in public spaces, reported nooses placed on the desks of Black employees, and found Tesla management unresponsive and even dismissive of their concerns. Unsurprisingly, the office culture at Tesla looks a lot like the social culture on X: unapologetically and even defiantly toxic.
Controversy even risks engulfing SpaceX, long the standout endeavor in Musk’s portfolio. Back in August, the Justice Department sued SpaceX for alleged anti-immigrant discrimination, another trend on ready display over on X. If it’s true that executives take their lead from the person at the top, Musk has done a fantastic job introducing X’s poisonous and anti-social culture to previously functional businesses.
But even a damaged X remains a powerful one, and Musk is well aware of the power his platform holds heading into the heat of the 2024 election. Even with X bleeding money and his absenteeism endangering his other ventures, Musk appears completely focused on completing X’s transition from a normal social network into an intercontinental ballistic version of right-wing hate sites Gab and Parler. Judging by how openly Musk is now monetizing white nationalism, he’s making that transition at warp speed.
That’s bad news for democracy. Intelligence analysts predict the 2024 election will be awash in disinformation and misinformation, and X is now one of the world’s biggest proliferators of fake news and state-backed propaganda campaigns. That disregard for the truth seems to tickle Musk, even as it makes an already challenging election cycle even more unstable and dangerous.
With most of his companies now facing some form of federal investigation, Musk has predictably become even more hostile to political and legal norms than ever. That’s clearly costing his businesses money and, in the case of Twitter, shredding its once considerable public influence and cultural cachet. Musk is now willing to weaken Americans’ faith in our elections and bankrupt his own businesses in order to own the libs. He may well get his chance.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.