Frontline: "Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover" (GBH, PBS, aired October 10, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Tuesday, October 10) my husband Charles and I watched an episode of the long-running PBS documentary series Frontline called “Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover.” It was basically yet another story about a super-rich man who buys a major media outlet and uses it (or tries to) to mold public opinion in a Rightward direction. Elon Musk made several tons of money by first starting and then selling PayPal; this supposedly made him the richest man in the world for a time, and he diversified into rocketry with SpaceX and electric cars with Tesla. (The Tesla company was actually started by others and Musk just bought it from them, a fact about Musk I didn’t know until I watched this program.) Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams launched a social-media company in 2004 which they called Twitter. Twitter took off almost immediately and became a nationwide, and then a worldwide, sensation, largely because of its convenience. You could post messages, called “tweets,” on it just with a smartphone and an Internet connection; you didn’t have to own a computer or a fixed Internet address. Elon Musk joined Twitter in 2010 and became an enthusiastic user, often firing off various missives in the middle of the night and sending outrageous opinions via the service. The program really didn’t tell much about Musk’s unusual background; he’s a white South African by birth, and as a child he was bullied both by schoolmates and his family. Musk also has acknowledged having Asperger’s syndrome – though that wasn’t mentioned on the Frontline show – and he was almost certainly the first currently serving CEO of a major corporation to host an episode of Saturday Night Live. In 2022 Musk announced that he was going to buy Twitter and made an offer of $43 million for the entire company – or at least that part of it he didn’t already own (he’d previously bought enough stock the original owners had offered to put him on the company’s board, but he wanted it all). Then he tried to back out of the deal, maybe out of fears that $42 billion was more than the company was worth, but the previous owners threatened to sue him if he tried to welch.

So Musk went ahead, became sole proprietor of Twitter in October 2022 after having first bid for the company in April, and immediately fired the three remaining founders. Then he fired half the company’s workforce, bringing in engineers and others from Tesla and SpaceX that may have known how to build cars and rockets but knew little about how to run a computer company. That reminded me of the “conglomerization” mania of the 1960’s, in which executives and boards of directors decided that managing one sort of enterprise was like managing another, so you had companies that sold insurance or ran parking lots buying movie studios. Most of the conglomerateurs lost scads of money buying companies in businesses they didn’t even begin to understand, and in the early part of this documentary it looks very much like that’s what Musk did here. Musk had borrowed heavily to take over Twitter and many of the layoffs were motivated by a desire to bring his payroll down to a level he could afford – only by doing so he deprived himself of the accumulated expertise both of the people he’d fired and the people he left behind, who were scared shitless that the tumbrels would come for them and they’d be the next to go. Musk also said he wanted Twitter to be a platform for “free speech,” which he defined in practice as letting as many Right-wingers as he could on the platform use it to spew hatred and prejudice. It’s unclear just how and why Musk’s politics have skewed so heavily Rightward over the years – unlike Ronald Reagan, he hasn’t left us a coherent conversion narrative – but the show, directed by James Jacoby and co-written by him and Anya Bourg, suggests various possibilities.

One was the COVID-19 pandemic and the order Musk got from California Governor Gavin Newsom and the rest of the state government to close his Tesla factory “for the duration.” At the time the state was ordering a lockdown in an attempt to prevent the spread of SARS-Co-V-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 – though Jacoby and Bourg made the lockdown seem far more total than it was. Both my husband Charles and I were in jobs that were considered “essential” – he as a grocery-store clerk and I doing home health care – and therefore we kept working through the height of the pandemic. Musk immediately embraced the conspiracy theories that COVID-19 wasn’t that big a deal and it was being used by various sinister forces within the government and other places to strip Americans of their freedom. He said so on Twitter again and again and again, and though his own posts don’t appear to have been taken down, other people’s expressing the same ideas were. The whole issue of so-called “content moderation” at social media companies in general and the big ones, Twitter and Facebook, in particular has been fraught with both genuine concern about First Amendment freedoms and allegations, especially from the American Right, that the social-media companies are being run by a cabal of social liberals who are censoring the views of so-called “conservatives.” (I put the word in quotes because most Americans who call themselves “conservatives” are nothing of the sort; they are radical-Right revolutionaries who want a major social, political, economic and moral transformation of American society in a more authoritarian direction, often involving white supremacism and what’s been called “Christian nationalism.”) Another was the personal coming-out of one of Elon Musk’s children (he’s had 11, by three different women) as Transgender. While other parents of Trans kids have either struggled with themselves and ultimately acknowledged them or have accepted it from the get-go, Musk seems to have treated it as a personal insult, There’s a dispatch from the TMZ Web site from June 20, 2022 (https://www.tmz.com/2022/06/20/elon-musk-daughter-name-change-transgender-court-filing/) announcing the name-change petition from Xavier Musk to Vivian Jenna Wilson, which quotes her as saying the reason she wants it is “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” Musk’s initial public response was to say he supports the Trans community, but “all these pronouns are an aesthetic nightmare.”

Be that as it may, Musk’s politics have shifted so far Right that in the 2022 midterms he donated almost exclusively to Republican candidates, he put out a weird video alleging that America’s problems are coming from the Left rather than the Right, and he coined the phrase “woke mind virus” to mean the Left-wing mind-set he thinks is destroying America and the world. In 2023 he invited Florida Governor Ron DeSantis onto Twitter for a live-streamed announcement of DeSantis’s Presidential candidacy. The two seemed like a perfect fit at first – DeSantis has also made fighting “woke-ism” a principal part of his campaign ideology and has called Florida “the place where woke goes to die” – but the event was a fiasco. It took 20 minutes before Musk’s engineers fixed the technological glitches, and DeSantis came off like an extra in his own announcement as Musk hogged the spotlight. The Frontline documentary on Musk began with quotes from people like long-time Internet reporter Kara Swisher, who has long known Musk and interviewed him fairly often, who said, “I thought he'd be a good owner … because he has the money, the means, and the creativity.” There was also a quote from another woman (Frontline posted a transcript of the show, but it was a rush job that mostly accurately quoted what was said but did a lousy job of recording who said it) who commented, “I've never seen a billionaire own a media platform that so obviously is using it as a personal platform.” The moment I heard that, I thought, “Does the name ‘William Randolph Hearst’ mean anything to you?,” and through much of this show I was thinking of the famous line from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), in which the Hearst-like Charles Foster Kane’s first wife frets, “Really, darling, people will think … “ – and he snaps back, “What I tell ‘em to think!” The modern world is full of media moguls like Musk and Rupert Murdoch (there’s a fascinating shot in the documentary of the two of them sharing a luxury box at the last Super Bowl) who want, hope and believe they can remodel the world’s consciousness in a radical-Right direction that will eliminate all that pesky nonsense about democracy and equality.

One of the biggest battlegrounds in tech and its intersections with the polarized political world we live in is over “content moderation” and the whole idea of holding Internet companies accountable for the misinformation and disinformation on their platforms. The Frontline show identified three people as having suffered particularly harsh fates for their involvement in “content moderation.” One was Yoel Roth, who at the time of Musk’s takeover was working at Twitter as “head of integrity.” When Roth posted warning messages on a few of then-President Donald Trump’s tweets alleging fraud in the 2020 election, Roth got hammered from Trump himself as well as various Fox News hosts. Trump said, “If Twitter were not honorable, if you're gonna have a guy like this be your judge and jury, I think, just shut it down, as far as I'm concerned, but I'd have to go through a legal process to do that.” Others called Roth both a Nazi and a pedophile, and he received death threats and needed a personal security detail at his home. The second Twitter victim of the Right-wing hate machine was Anika Navaroli, who sent messages warning that Trump’s and others’ tweets between Joe Biden’s win in the November 2020 election and Congress’s official declaration of his election on January 6, 2021 could incite violence – as indeed they did on that date. Navaroli explained to Jacoby and Bourg, “What I was advocating before January 6 was not for the permanent suspension or permanent banning of any one account, but rather the taking down of individual content. And I remember, you know, sending a message to a larger team and saying – and this was, like, December of 2020 – saying out loud, you know, ‘If there were any other country in the world in which the leader of the elected party was contesting a open and fair election, and their followers were openly calling for civil war, would we do anything differently?’ Because I firmly believed, given, you know, the other circumstances that I had worked and I had seen, that we would, and yet we were not acting in this specific case.”

The third victim didn’t work for Twitter: she was Nina Jankowitz, a government staffer who, as Jacoby explained, “was appointed to lead a new board inside the Department of Homeland Security, part of a broader push by the Biden administration to respond to misinformation in the wake of the pandemic and lies about the 2020 election.” Unfortunately, the Biden Administration appointees who tried to create this board gave it the Orwellian-sounding name “Disinformation Governance Board,” and within a few days all plans to create it were canceled. The ways Right-wing media and social activists treated Roth, Navaroli and Jankowicz have become the standard playbook for the ways Right-wing Americans treat their real or perceived “enemies.” Their personal information, including their home addresses, were posted online and Right-wing journalists and commentators denounced them as comparable to Nazis and the bureaucrats who ran the ruling Inner Party in George Orwell’s 1984. The predictable result was death threats against them and their families – and yet another revelation of just how much dirt drives the current American Right and how vile they are, how they see their adversaries not as fellow human beings to be reasoned with or compromised but as inhuman thugs who need to be fought “by any means necessary.”

Musk’s latest act in his transformation of Twitter was to change its name; on June 23, 2023 he announced that from then on the platform would be renamed “X.” The letter “X” itself has a huge significance for Musk; he’s named one of his kids “X” and the “X” designation harks back to a dream he had when he started PayPal: “X.com,” the universal Web site through which you could do anything. Musk said “X.com” would be the new Web address for the company formerly known as Twitter, and the ambition of himself and his newly appointed Twitter CEO, former NBC/Universal ad executive Linda Yaccarino, would be to start his long dreamed-of “‘everything app’ for messaging, calls, social media posts, entertainment, payments, and more.” Meanwhile, X nèe Twitter continues to lose money at an ultra-fast pace – enough that Musk is no longer officially the richest man in the world – and major advertisers have bailed from the site as companies like Coca-Cola no longer want their products associated with the racist garbage Musk’s X now allows on the platform. There are plenty of stories about Musk’s sheer pettiness as a human being – from his cancellation of one Twitter site that used publicly available Federal Aviation Administration records to track the movements of Musk’s private jet, to his deletion of the accounts of journalists who covered the jet story and linked to the “Elon Musk’s Jet” page, to a story not mentioned here (https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/how-elon-musk-could-affect-the-2024-election) about how he once personally canceled an order for a Tesla car because the would-be buyer had posted a mildly anti-Musk comment on his personal blog. Musk’s saga is a fresh example of the danger capitalism in general and individual buccaneer capitalists in particular pose to the world: their fantastic wealth not only makes them giant social and political influencers but they have the power and ability to block any attempt to hold them accountable to common norms of humanity and decency.