Dissecting Elon Musk’s Tweets: Memes, Rants, Private Parts and Echo Chamber

The day after Thanksgiving, practically one month after Elon Musk grew to become the proprietor of Twitter, he returned to considered one of his pastime horses. “I’m just fighting for free speech in America,” he wrote in a tweet.

One of 28 that he posted that day — starting simply after midnight, following messages about how tasty his vacation meal was — the free speech tweet was in response to 2 followers who had been aggrieved about how Mr. Musk was being handled since buying the social community in late October. The publish was appreciated greater than 46,000 occasions.

Mr. Musk has typically stated that Twitter must be extra open and stuffed with a better range of voices and factors of view. But Mr. Musk’s Twitter feed is commonly an echo chamber. He frequently sees, likes and replies to messages which can be about him or are posted from accounts that usually act as his cheerleaders, in accordance with a New York Times evaluation of his exercise on the platform.

In order to evaluate how the social community might evolve underneath Mr. Musk’s watch, The Times reviewed practically 20,000 of his tweets, analyzing posts from current years and pictures he printed over the previous decade, in addition to the comparatively small variety of customers that he follows.

What Mr. Musk says on Twitter has an enormous attain, now greater than ever: His viewers is without doubt one of the largest, with practically 128 million accounts following him. It is the place he solicits recommendation, conducts polls, condemns censorship and proclaims sweeping coverage adjustments on the platform. As an influence person who now controls the corporate — he not too long ago known as himself the “chief twit” — Mr. Musk has vowed to remake the social community in his imaginative and prescient.

Of the 178 accounts that Mr. Musk adopted as of Tuesday, most had been associated to his companies, or have expressed admiration of his enterprise type, the Times evaluation discovered. The record is closely male: Only two dozen that aren’t institutional or organizational accounts belong to girls. He is said to 2 of them — his mom, Maye, and sister, Tosca — and was married to a 3rd.

Amid discussions of Twitter insurance policies, web satellites from SpaceX and Tesla software program updates, his posts have a freewheeling high quality to them. He traffics in juvenile humor and vulgar jokes (photos of tape dispensers laid in sexual positions), scientific marvels (the Large Hadron Collider), common topics on far-right websites (Pepe the Frog) and critiques of divisive cultural points (“I’m not brainwashed!!”).

Mr. Musk’s posting type is conversational, and frequently satirical. He messages with former Democratic cupboard officers, criticizes information organizations and trades barbs with enterprise capitalists.

“The purchasing of Twitter was a power move, politically,” stated Joan Donovan, the analysis director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. “He is one of the richest man in the world buying a social media company in a move that is expressly about politics and influence on culture and on media.”

Often, his updates are restricted to simply memes — joking pictures or movies which can be copied and extensively shared. Many have origins on fringe websites or cryptocurrency message boards which can be common together with his followers. Some are about him. Some seem like authentic.

Mr. Musk didn’t reply to a request for remark about his exercise. At Twitter, as with lots of his different corporations, Mr. Musk has no conventional press workforce. Instead, he tweets.

Since he created his account in June 2009, Mr. Musk has posted greater than 21,000 occasions. In current years, that has meant posting all hours of the day, most days of the week.

Mr. Musk has “made himself unignorable by becoming king of Twitter,” Ms. Donovan added.

Over a 48-hour interval in November, a second when he touted file exercise on the social community underneath his management, Mr. Musk posted 60 occasions. His posts included commentary on the collapse of a cryptocurrency and combative responses to critiques about his office insurance policies. In one occasion, he issued a decree about parody accounts after customers modified their profile names to mimic him.

Many of his missives shortly grew to become common amongst his followers.

It is unclear precisely what Mr. Musk sees in his feed. The actual sequence depends upon whether or not he has chosen to obtain algorithmic suggestions or simply tweets from accounts he follows. (He has beforehand tweeted that persons are being “manipulated by the algorithm.”)

His exercise more and more consists of replying to customers who’ve talked about him. When he responds to accounts that he doesn’t comply with, he often chooses people who have complimented or praised him: In dozens of cases over the previous six months, in accordance with the Times evaluation, he has replied to tweets from customers whose account descriptions point out that they help or spend money on corporations owned by Mr. Musk, or that they’re followers of his management.

There are occasions when he second guesses what he broadcasts.

Over the previous two years, he has deleted a whole lot of tweets inside hours of posting them. According to the PolitiTweet web site, which archives all of Mr. Musk’s tweets, he has additionally deleted dozens of tweets within the months since he acquired Twitter.

On Nov. 14, for instance, Mr. Musk tweeted that he can be “working and sleeping” at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco till the positioning was mounted.

A web site monitoring Mr. Musk’s non-public jet motion advised that he traveled away from San Francisco round that point. He deleted the tweet 18 hours after first posting it.

But for an individual with as massive a follower base as Mr. Musk has, deleting tweets might do little to vary how extensively seen or influential these posts turn out to be when they’re first printed.

“Millions of people see his tweets, not many will notice when they are deleted,” Ms. Donovan stated.

Many tweets which have landed Mr. Musk in scorching water stay on-line.

In 2018, just a few weeks after Mr. Musk had smoked marijuana throughout an on-camera interview for Joe Rogan’s podcast, Mr. Musk tweeted that he had the funding to take Tesla non-public at $420 a share.

Experts started to query whether or not his whole feed was being produced in jest, and identified the repeated marijuana references in his tweets (together with his proposed funding worth).

That incident led to prices from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and later a settlement that included monitoring of what Mr. Musk may publish about Tesla on Twitter. Shareholders at the moment are additionally in search of billions of {dollars} in damages in a lawsuit after Mr. Musk’s takeover proposal by no means materialized.

Last week, Mr. Musk joined an investor name as Tesla reported its current quarterly earnings, which confirmed a decent soar in income regardless of a rising record of issues plaguing the corporate. The automaker’s blended efficiency final 12 months had led many to query whether or not Mr. Musk’s focus and a focus on Twitter had meant that he was neglecting his duties at Tesla.

Mr. Musk deflected that criticism on the earnings name, suggesting that his thousands and thousands of Twitter followers had been an indication of his recognition.

“I might not be popular with some people,” he stated, “but for the vast majority of people, my follower count speaks for itself.”