The Problem With Elon Musk

Uh, I mean, my mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me. They may think they would want to be me, but they don't. They don't know—is your storm a happy storm? No. I've grown tired of hearing the name Elon Musk and not really understanding what's going on. Who is this guy? Where is he from? How has he built a huge business empire to become one of the richest people in the world? And what can we learn about his purchase of Twitter?

So, I've been going on a deep dive, finding everything I can about this guy—his upbringing, the businesses he started, talking to people who have worked with him, who have worked for him. Many of these people want to remain anonymous for reasons you will soon understand. I've talked to people who love him, people who hate him, people who used to love him and now hate him. If I were an employee at Twitter right now, I'd probably just do your job; don't let him know your name. So, after a few months of reporting on this, I feel like I finally have a handle on who this guy is. I understand how he built his empire, how he treats the people around him, and the real reason I believe he bought Twitter.

Elon Musk put in an unsolicited bid to buy the social media platform—44 billion. So, let me show you the rise and rule of Elon Musk. You're a supervillain; that's what a supervillain does. Yeah, he's addicted to drama, who's addicted to risk, and when everything seems to be going smoothly, he almost has a compulsion to screw things up.

Elon Musk was born in the summer of 1971 in South Africa. From a young age, he was bullied pretty relentlessly by kids at school for being scrawny and nerdy. I was, you know, bullied quite a lot. I was punched in the face many times. Musk would later say that he's on the autism spectrum, though he was never diagnosed. It was really bad for young Elon. Like, one time when he got beaten up at school, he was so bloodied he had to go to the hospital. The scars were actually worse when he came home, and his father made him stand in front of him and berated him for more than an hour, calling him stupid, saying it was his fault. Stories like this make me sick to my stomach, and you realize that the trauma and scars from this kind of abuse, both physical and emotional, they don't go away easily.

Speaking of his dad, there's a lot of rumors that Elon came from a rich dad who owned emerald mines in South Africa, and that he was set up to be successful because of family wealth. This isn't factually accurate. Elon's dad did import emeralds, but there wasn't a lot of money in this family. He never owned an emerald mine. This is total balderdash. If you want more detail on that, you can go check out our sources where we put the fact check for every one of the assertions in this video. Anyway, what Elon did have at a young age was a skill for computers and programming.

I taught myself how to program computers, mostly because I wanted to program games. At the age of 12, he invented a video game. "Mom, do you remember when I was 12 and I created my own video game?" That he sold to a magazine for $500. It was his first business move in tech. His first interest in space was around 12 or 13. "I had a complete existential crisis trying to figure out the meaning of life." From an early age, Musk found meaning in the idea of the potential of humanity, what humans can do as a collective—how we, as a species, have somehow been able to work together to explore the meaning of the universe.

"My motivation was that if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, maybe we can find out the meaning of life." I mean, you hear this, and it kind of sounds overly grand, kind of delusional, overly idealistic. But honestly, this is what motivates Musk from a very young age, and he doesn't bend on what he wants and what he's willing to do to achieve it.

So, he leaves South Africa when he's 18 and moves to Canada, and eventually ends up in Pennsylvania, where he goes to college and gets a degree in economics and physics. At the age of 24, he moves out to California to pursue a PhD at Stanford, but he never starts the program; instead, he starts his first business.

Okay, so I'm not going to go into the details of every one of Elon's companies because there are a lot. If you want to deep dive, read this very thick book. This was a foundational part of our reporting, and it details the play-by-play on all of these companies. For now, let me give you a quick summary of the businesses this guy built to become one of the richest men on the planet. His first company was called Zip2; he started it in 1995 with his brother, who seems to have an affinity for cowboy hats. His company provided maps and business directories for online newspapers. I know those words sound very strange to us now, but like back in 1995, it was a huge deal. It almost was like the precursor to what Google Maps is today, and it was very successful.

We helped bring online several hundred newspapers that previously were only in print. It was acquired a few years later for $37 million, $22 million of those dollars going right into Elon's pocket. Suddenly, Elon is rich. "Receiving cash is cash!" I mean, those are just a large number of Benjamins. He uses the money to start another company called X.com. No, no, no, not that X.com—the first X.com, which you now know today as PayPal.

So, this is an ATM. What we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry. It was basically an online bank, and it was revolutionary at the time. So much so that in 2002, eBay bought it for $1.5 billion. Elon got $180 million of those dollars, and now he's officially super rich. There is Tesla—the fastest car in the world.

So, what to do with all of this money? The answer for Elon Musk was to try out the craziest ideas he could think of. "Well, I had like about $180 million from PayPal. I thought, you know, I'll allocate half of that to SpaceX and Tesla and SolarCity. That should be fine. I'll have $90 million left." I thought our probability of success was less than 10%. It would be foolish to think anything else other than that.

Ever since he was a kid making video games about space, Elon has been motivated by this idea of humans expanding outside of Earth—humans becoming a multiplanetary species. "We would like to help make life multiplanetary—the extension of life to multiple planets." In the early 2000s, Tesla already existed; they were making electric cars, but they were kind of high-end niche sports cars. Elon was really interested in this, so he came in as an investor and eventually became the CEO with the vision of turning electric cars mainstream and ushering in a whole new era of transportation.

But these ideas were more expensive than he anticipated—things cost more and took longer than he thought. So, I had a choice of either put the rest of the money in, or the companies are going to die. His rockets kept blowing up, and his electric cars were devilishly complicated to manufacture. But Elon developed this addiction to risk and intensity that kept him pushing forward despite these challenges. Tesla reinvented how cars were made. Thanks to innovative technology and manufacturing, really clever engineering, and a waterfall of government subsidies, he was able to skyrocket Tesla into one of the most valuable companies in the world, overtaking every other car company by a long shot in just a few years.

And this company was weird. It wasn't obeying all the rules; like, there was almost no official marketing campaign, and Elon decided to make all of his technology open source. The patents were not copyrighted; anyone could see them and use them with the hope that the market for electric vehicles would take off and that the world would more quickly move away from the use of fossil fuels, which would ultimately benefit Tesla.

"So, if somebody comes and makes a better electric car than Tesla and it's so much better than ours that we can't sell our cars and we go bankrupt, I still think that's a good thing for the world." These were bold, crazy moves, but they were totally working. Meanwhile, Elon's space company was about to go out of business. For SpaceX, the first three launches failed—just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the fourth launch. And then, after six years and six months of stress and intensity, Elon's dreams of going to space started to come true.

I'm going to explain a little bit more about how he did all of this, but the big deal about SpaceX is that they created a reusable rocket. Every other rocket is disposable; you can only use it once, and it's very expensive. But Elon proved that you could use a rocket and safely land it back down onto the surface of Earth and then use it again. Soon, SpaceX would be carrying NASA astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station, launching military satellites into space for the Pentagon, launching dozens of satellites up into space for commercial use, and even launching the first-ever private space flight for tourism. Space travel was officially reinvented.

"I think we're at the dawn of a new era, and it's a reason for people to be excited and inspired to be human." Okay, but what's crazy is that during all of this, Elon is also launching a bunch of other companies, like the Boring Company, which is trying to revolutionize traffic and transportation by building smarter tunnels. Oh my God, it just hit me that it's boring—like boring into the side of a mountain. Oh my God, that just hit me right now.

This company also turned into like a blank canvas for Elon Musk to play out all of his childish, silly ideas, like selling a flamethrower or this perfume that smells like singed human hair. And yes, Musk uses his businesses as kind of a way to troll humanity while also trying to save humanity. It's this behavior that a lot of people find refreshing and ends up getting a lot of attention and becoming a marketing tool for all of his companies. He starts building Neuralink, which is designing a way for humans to control computers with their brains, which is already having some initial successes.

And now that Elon's company can easily go to space, he starts sending up these small satellites—6,000 of them—that are orbiting the Earth, and he starts providing internet to remote places, arguably changing the course of the war in Ukraine by providing Ukrainian soldiers with internet during the initial invasion from Russia. Though that's gotten more complicated in recent months as Russian soldiers have started to use Starlink, and it's a whole other rabbit hole.

Okay, but we're not done yet with Elon's companies. He also co-founded OpenAI way back in 2015, who went on to make ChatGPT. He later left the company over disagreements and then has recently started his own AI company called— you guessed it—X.ai. Yes, the guy loves the letter X; it's literally the name of several of his companies and one of his children. Each one of these ventures points back to Elon's childish idealism—this grand vision of testing the limits of what humans can do by pushing our understanding of physics and working together to do crazy, amazing things.

But then, after building all of these companies that are focused on pushing the physical limits of human potential, Elon in recent years has set his sights on reshaping another industry. Tonight, the richest man in the world is hunting for more, putting in an offer of almost $44 billion to buy Twitter. "Is this all a troll or is this very real?" Elon Musk has been portrayed as both a reckless, unethical billionaire as well as a visionary who is changing the world for the better.

And what you think about him probably comes from what you read about him, and what you read about him was probably served to you by an algorithm. This is how our media landscape works these days, and it's getting us deeper and deeper into trouble, which is a major theme in this video. But it's also in line with the sponsor of today's video, which is Ground News. Ground News is a platform that I've been using to navigate this problem to find a balanced view, where I can see both sides of a news story. Ground News aggregates tens of thousands of news articles from around the world into one place and then allows you to critically examine how that news is being covered.

Here's a recent story that, on the left, you can see from the Los Angeles Times that engineers sued Elon Musk and SpaceX, saying that the company mirrored his juvenile, crude posts. While on the right, you've got the New York Post saying that Elon Musk was sued by fired engineers alleging Elon Musk allowed pervasive sexist culture. These headlines have subtle bias in them; like, the left-leaning headline suggests that Musk's personal behavior was directly responsible, while the right-leaning headline emphasizes that they were fired employees and that there was an alleged sexist culture, softening any kind of blame towards Musk and his company.

This is really subtle stuff that's hard to pay attention to if you're just scrolling your algorithm. Ground News emphasizes and highlights these biases and allows you to be more critical as a news consumer. Not only do they show this biased distribution, but they also have a tool that rates how factual an article is, and my favorite—they have this blind spot detector that pays attention to the articles that you tend to read and presents you with stuff that might be outside of your comfort zone, but that you probably need to see to be a balanced news consumer.

This is a really cool tool. I'm very glad they exist; I'm really glad they're sponsoring today's video. If you want to try this out for yourself, go to groundnews.com/JohnyHarris, where you'll get 40% off the Vantage plan, which is unlimited access to all of these features. I use Ground News; I think it's really important in today's media landscape. I'm grateful that they sponsored today's video. With that, let's dive back into the story of Elon Musk.

Tonight, the richest man in the world is hunting for more. Okay, so we're getting into this: why did Elon buy Twitter? What can we learn from it? Before we do that, I want to tell you a little bit about what I learned about Elon Musk as a leader after talking to people who have worked with him, people who have worked under him. There's a few key lessons that I've taken away from all of these conversations we've had with these people and doing research on him.

I will not be quoting them directly because most of them asked to remain anonymous. The first thing I heard over and over again is how obsessed Elon Musk is with the details of what his companies are building. I think people think, "I'm a business guy or something like that." Engineering—that's like 80% more of my time. One source I talked to who worked closely with Musk estimates that he spends 90% of his time in technical details—with a whiteboard out, looking at code with engineers and programmers, solving very specific details in meetings that sometimes go into the middle of the night.

And this gets to our second takeaway, which is that Elon questions everything. And I mean everything. You can see this really clearly when he was building SpaceX. "It was tough going there in the beginning because I'd never built anything physical. I mean, I'd built little model rockets as a kid, and that kind of thing, but I'd never had a company that built anything physical." Elon's original idea for SpaceX was to buy Russian rockets that had been decommissioned and to rebuild them more efficiently. "I can tell you it was very weird going to the Russian rocket forces and saying, 'I’d like to buy two of your biggest rockets.' They thought I was crazy."

But I did have money. He went to Russia and quickly discovered that the price that governments pay for rockets is astronomical. It felt absurd. On the flight home, Elon makes this list of every component he can think of needed to build a rocket, and then he put in the estimated price for just the materials and the components. What he found is that the prices that they were quoting him for these rocket parts were highly inflated. He interrogated every single cost associated with rockets and started to make plans on how his team could find a much cheaper way to build them.

He did this over and over and over until soon his team was manufacturing 70% of all of the rocket components for SpaceX, saving millions of dollars. I heard story after story like this—Elon showing up, talking to some low-level engineer working on some very specific problem and interrogating it until he found the most efficient answer. Oh, and this wasn't about him being collaborative or inclusive of his employees; this is about him stress-testing every single assumption, pushing every single thing to the limit so that he can find the most efficient way to build something.

This also makes working for Elon incredibly stressful. He'll show up; he'll question everything, and then he'll tell people that a six-month timeline needs to be condensed down into 90 days. Everyone's jaw drops; they say it's impossible. He says it has to be possible, and then everyone makes it happen, which gets me to number four: the people around him. Musk's ruthless idealism and vision for the future has attracted a lot of really talented people who bring these dreams to life. These people have rallied around his mission to reinvent transportation or take humans to Mars. They're the ones who make it happen with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

These four things are really his superpowers; they are the ingredients that have allowed him to reinvent entire industries. But this isn't the full picture. Everyone I talk to includes the fact that Elon can be a total jerk and is a lot of the time. "Hate me, like me, or indifferent—do you want the best car or do you not want the best car?" He is abrupt; he is blunt, and he puts basically no effort into making you like him. "No, I am not the evil genius; I'm just a misunderstood one."

Irony I kept hearing is that Musk cares so much about humanity, but he doesn't really care about humans. Okay, so I'm the father of an 11-year-old who is autistic, and I myself identify as being on some part of the spectrum. So, listening to hours of Musk, I see moments that to most people might look like him being mean-hearted and arrogant and extreme and even cruel but to me feel more like him being unaware or perhaps unwilling to play by the rules of social norms.

Okay, but—and because my son is probably watching this—I need to make one thing crystal clear: there is a line here. Musk's behavior, especially recently, can quickly cross into malicious, temperamental, mean-hearted and harmful behavior that goes well beyond anything that can be justified or explained by neurodivergence into something that looks a lot more like aggressive bullying, coercion, unethical business practices.

There's almost a demon mode of Elon Musk where it turns really dark, and that can be very problematic, especially when it came to acquiring Twitter. My point is that there's some empathy that is warranted here. It can be a blurry line, but Musk very clearly crosses that line—something we'll talk about more in a little bit. But for now, let's get back to our list—these five things that are the big takeaways on how Musk operates and how he's built his empire.

And let's look at where he got him: by the early 2020s, his four big companies had grown rapidly to become worth billions—Tesla reaching a trillion-dollar valuation, one of the most valuable companies on Earth, revolutionizing the car industry. And by January 2021, these successes had skyrocketed Musk to become the world's richest man, according to Forbes billionaire tracker. But don't be fooled; for Musk, this actually isn't an ideal situation. Musk's biographer Walter Isaacson wrote this amazing book that details all of this private communication that gives us an inside look into the psychology of Musk during this time.

And he documents this conversation between Siobhan Zillis, the director of operations at one of his companies and the mother of a set of Elon's twins, and Elon. In a text that read, "You don't have to be in a state of war all the time, or is that where you find greater comfort when you're in periods of war?" And he replies that it's a part of his default setting. Zillis then tells Isaac that it was like he was winning the simulation, and now he felt at a loss at what to do. Extended periods of calm were unnerving for him.

The guy is addicted to conflict and crisis and tension and drama, and being the world's richest man with all these successes was uncomfortable. He needed a new storm to throw himself into, and so he chose the storm of all storms. At the end of 2022, he buys Twitter for $44 billion. In his offer letter, he tells us why he's doing it. He believes that Twitter has the potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe and that free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.

And right away, Musk applies his playbook to the company, sending out a midnight email telling the thousands of employees that there's going to be a new Twitter culture that is "extremely hardcore," long hours, high intensity, and tells anyone who wants to stay to fill out this form or be fired. Thousands of Twitter employees are being laid off, locked out of their work email accounts. Twitter has fired half of its 7,500 staff. We called it the Twitter Hunger Games.

I thought a lot about how to talk about Musk's foray into Twitter because it is in the news right now; it is shaping the way that we receive and talk about information, and there's a lot of hot takes out there. What I decided to do here is to try to give the most earnest understanding as to Musk's motives. Why did he do this? What does he want from it? And what is he doing to reshape Twitter around this vision?

"What was it ultimately that led you to make the decision to do it?" Uh, somewhat melodramatic, but I was worried about that it was having a corrosive effect on civilization. So first and foremost, free speech is like the thing he says over and over—“speech, free speech, free speech”—is the only way that humans are going to thrive. And because Musk's main mission is the advancement of human civilization, he must buy Twitter and make it the free speech platform—the platform where we have perhaps the most important conversations in the world.

He says this over and over, like in this tweet where he says, "This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost, even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead." So that's number one on what he says his motives are. I think part of it is that it's where—it's where it was located, which is, you know, downtown San Francisco.

The next pillar of Musk's reasoning has to do with the city of San Francisco. Is there a place that's more far-left than San Francisco? Brookly? Twitter's headquarters is located right here in downtown San Francisco, and for Musk, that's a big problem. It was an accidental far-left information weapon that was then harnessed by the far-left who could not themselves create the weapon but happened to be collocated where the technologists were.

Okay, so let me get this straight: Musk believes that Twitter being in the heart of a liberal city means that the engineers and leaders deciding what gets elevated and suppressed on Twitter are infected with the politics of the liberal city and so they're more likely to elevate their ideology—an information weapon—that's his argument.

I have a couple of issues with the argument and its logical underpinning, but again, this is about what Elon Musk says and as his motivations for buying Twitter. And number three: the government is censoring Twitter and Twitter is letting them. "Twitter was simply an arm of the government. You know, it's a state publication is the way to think of old Twitter. It's a state publication."

All right, this is our list; we're going to get to each of these and try to understand them all. But like, is anyone else wondering what happened here? It feels like the story went from quirky visionary engineer uses his brilliant, unorthodox, socially immature tactics and obsessions to accomplish unprecedented engineering feats to said quirky engineer suddenly dedicates his brilliant mind away from physics and towards social media because he believes that there's a deep state conspiracy between San Francisco technologists infected with liberal bias and they're censoring government overlords, and he is going to fix it. What happened?

I actually never got to the bottom of that, and I don't think anyone has. That's actually been a central question that was never answered for me during this reporting. We do know this pivot happened sometime in 2020. Why did Musk shift to obsessing over this? The answer to that probably lies somewhere in Elon Musk's brain, and it is not ethical or useful for me to try to opine on his mental health or what is going on in his brain. So, let's stick to the facts here.

Here is the logical framework that Elon Musk used to buy Twitter. This is what he wants to do with it: fix this. Let's see what happens next. So, after firing most of the employees and changing the name to his favorite letter, he gets to work on free speech. He lets big accounts that were previously banned back onto the platform, including former President Donald Trump, comedian Kathy Griffin, lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jordan Peterson.

Within a few months, he posts this tweet around the Super Bowl, and he notices that this tweet gets less engagement than the tweet by President Joe Biden. Elon does not like this. He calls an urgent meeting and tasks 80 engineers to quickly rebuild a version of the algorithm that will allow his tweets to be artificially boosted by a factor of a thousand. I was kind of skeptical on how sensational it was reported, but through my conversations, I confirmed that this actually went down.

Like the old Twitter was not built to artificially boost one account, and Elon—the free speech guy—was like, "I need you to boost my account because it's not getting as much attention as the president and the ad." Engineers did it. So, a few months after buying the company, Elon now has super algorithmic power and he uses it to start to amplify certain people.

So, I know what you're thinking: "Johnny, you just disagree with these people, and so you think that it's bad that Elon let them on." But really, free speech is about letting everyone talk. Yes, absolutely, that is true. And yet, Elon uses an artificially amplified voice to prop up a very specific type of voice on Twitter to amplify ideas—extreme ideas, harmful ideas—not just to liberals in San Francisco, but ideas that we, as humanity, recognize are bad ideas.

And now someone with a massive megaphone has control over how big those ideas can get. Even Bill Maher, the Elon fanboy, said, "There are very few people who actually make change happen; you are one of those people." Even he could not understand why Elon was doing this. "I understand why you wanted to have a platform where you have free speech, but like, why then embrace the worst people on it?"

And then Elon isn't totally consistent about this. Like in the case of Alex Jones, who spreads horrendous conspiracies and misinformation to a lot of people, when asked why Elon didn't let him go back onto Twitter, he said no, saying that he had no mercy for anyone who would use the death of children for gain, politics, or fame. He did eventually reinstate Alex Jones after running a poll.

But you start to see that he'll reinstate anyone unless he personally takes issue with their views or what they said. What's puzzling to me is that this isn't free speech absolutism; it's not "say anything you want." Musk's new Twitter then starts banning and suppressing Substack links. Substack, the place where independent journalists write, Musk made the change where you can't comment or like on anything that has a Substack article and you can't embed tweets in your Substack article. That doesn't feel like free speech to me.

Musk then decides that the word "cisgender" is a slur on Twitter and threatens to ban people who use it too much. Is that free speech? He then starts banning journalists who criticize him, though he did reinstate a few of them after a vote, and then starts suing media watchdog organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate, trying to silence them for criticizing the new Twitter.

Musk, of course, lost, with the verdict coming out saying that this lawsuit was basically about trying to silence criticism and deter others from criticizing his company. He's someone who is willing to use his enormous wealth and power to silence people. This is such clear anti-free speech behavior.

When Twitter users organized a protest against making users pay for a blue check mark, he banned that account. And this is what's so mind-bending—like, I swear he's trolling us here. He says that he's obsessed with free speech, but then immediately after taking it over Twitter, he demonstrates an extreme hypocrisy for that very point.

And I secretly think he's doing that so that we are talking about it right now. I don't think it was ever about free speech. I also think that when he posts political propaganda ads like this conspiracy video that says that Democrats are letting immigrants in to turn America into single-party rule and has almost 100 million views, I think he's doing that not because he agrees with this factless piece of propaganda but because he loves to rile people up.

Though maybe he does agree with it—I don't know. Either way, he has built a platform that gives him the biggest megaphone and suppresses people that criticize him. That is not free speech.

Okay, but let's move on. Free speech was just one of his three major motives. What about this argument that Twitter is infected with liberal ideology because it is based in San Francisco? Luckily we have data. This was a great study—very thorough algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter. It's a study from before Elon took over. They conducted a long-running, massive-scale randomized experiment where they looked at a huge number of tweets from seven countries, and they found that in six out of the seven countries, including the United States, the mainstream political right enjoys a higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left.

They saw this over and over. Oh, and also a really interesting side note here is that they found that Twitter actually doesn't amplify far-right or far-left political groups more than moderate ones, which is a myth that I believed until I read this study. But the whole point is that old Twitter did not have a liberal bias; if anything, it had a conservative bias. This study is very robust proof of that despite Elon's theory that Twitter being in San Francisco infected it with a liberal bias.

Go to the sources and read the study for yourself. If you want to poke into it, if there's anything wrong with it that I'm missing, please tell me. But it seems like pretty damn solid proof to me. Okay, but what about the last critique?

And this is a big one. Musk believed that Twitter was being censored by governments, and Twitter was letting them do this. And guess what? That is actually true. Upon taking over Twitter, Musk cracked into all of the internal communications and found a bunch of emails that showed how Twitter had banned and suppressed information that it deemed harmful and dangerous, but that they did so sometimes with a political bias. You can see things like Biden's team asking Twitter to review these tweets that they didn't like.

Yes, governments around the world can ask Twitter to take things down in their country that they think are breaking the law or that are harmful to national security, and this happened on both sides. The Trump White House asked Twitter to take things down as well. But this reporting did reveal what looked like a lot of left-leaning bias in censoring certain highly sensitive content that would be damaging to the left. The big example of this was this New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop. Twitter severely censored this—not even letting people DM the link to each other—and making up a thin justification for it later.

Now, content moderation—deciding what is harmful and what should be censored and what shouldn't—is a really difficult task. But for a lot of people, including myself, this crossed a line. This was not okay. Though I have to say that the Hunter Biden New York Post article was the most sort of egregious one. A lot of the other stuff in the Twitter files was not nearly as black and white, much more nuanced, much more complicated.

The point is, there should be transparency here, and I agree with Musk on that. Okay, but this is once again where we find some strange paradox that doesn't make any sense, which is that since Musk took over, government censorship on Twitter has gone up. Twitter suspended multiple journalists from prominent outlets, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN.

Tonight, a number of high-profile journalists have been silenced. Here are the number of takedown requests that governments around the world made to Twitter in the six months before Musk took over, and these are the ones that Twitter complied with. Twitter would fully comply with the government's censorship request about half of the time. The other half of the time, they'd say no. In the six months after Musk, the number of requests went up, probably because Musk got rid of a lot of the automatic moderation.

But look, Musk's Twitter now says yes to government censorship over 80% of the time—way more than the old Twitter. Wait, what? And look, the kind of stuff that Musk is allowing to be censored on the platform is really sensitive stuff for free speech. Like take Turkey, for example. There was a Turkish election last year. The president of Turkey himself—a massive user of state censorship—pressured Twitter to block the accounts of a few people he didn't like: a Kurdish businessman, an investigative journalist—both of them vocal critics of the president.

This is like clear black-and-white political censorship in an election year. Like, make the guy who is criticizing me go away. And guess what? Musk's Twitter did it. They said yes; they banned the accounts and then said, "We didn't have a choice; they were going to shut down all of Twitter, so we had to do it." And then they patted themselves on the back about how they were still trying to fight it and they're doing so much for battling government censorship and transparency on the platform.

But guess what? They did have a choice. This same kind of thing happened before Musk ever came in, and Twitter fought back. In a previous Turkish election, the government tried to do the same thing—censor posts about corruption within the Turkish government. They asked Twitter to take these down, and Twitter said no. They fired back that political speech is among the most important speech, especially when it concerns matters of possible corruption.

So Turkey shut down Twitter. It was down for a couple of weeks while they battled it out in court, and the Turkish government lost. Indeed, they lost because they were trying to censor political speech, and Twitter fought back. There's even more recent examples, like Wikipedia— or wikipedias, as Elon calls it—refusing to comply with the Turkish government censorship requests, getting completely shut down for almost three years, only to have it be overturned in Turkish courts—a major win for free speech in Turkey, which is something that's in short supply lately.

So, like Wikipedia, Twitter can do this; they can say no to the Turkish government. If they're actually crusaders for free speech, and if they're actually against government censorship, they would have said no in 2023. Musk's Twitter did this in India too. When the Indian government asked Twitter to censor a bunch of journalists— including an entire BBC bureau and a documentary that was critical of the government—and the president, Twitter complied.

Elon, where is your conviction for free speech? Where is your hate for government censorship in moments like this, where it really, really matters? But for Elon Musk, he's got a lot of other things he needs to think about. He needs to think about the market for Teslas, who might be buying his satellites or rockets. He needs to be thinking about where Tesla factories might be set up—the market for his electric cars.

This is a conflict of interest that gets in the way of his idealistic vision for free speech and his hate for government censorship. Twitter used to have a page where they would publish in detail why they would take down any content they took down at the request of the government. And there's this research lab at Harvard that would aggregate all of this for the public.

When our story producer Alex went to go look for these government requests from Turkey and India, she found that they no longer were there. This page had gone quiet. So she reached out to the Harvard lab and got this response: Twitter stopped sharing this data starting in April 2023. No more transparency on government censorship. It looks like it's down to the whims of one super-rich dude. That is not free speech; that is the antithesis of what this guy said he was going to build.

So, no, I don't think Elon Musk is earnest about these three things that he said were his motive for buying Twitter. In fact, after looking into all of this, I'm having a hard time figuring out what Elon is earnest about at all other than his belief that humans have the potential to do amazing things. I do believe that—of this, that is the one thing that has stayed consistent. But how he's pursuing that goal and that vision in recent years is baffling, confusing, and in my mind, quite harmful to our society.

Twitter seems much more like a platform where he can bully the people he doesn't like, he can feed his addiction to crisis and controversy while also showing a childish hypocrisy in his principles and values. But unlike his other ventures, which you can tell when they're successful because they're physics—the rocket either goes up into space or it doesn't, the car drives or it doesn't—this new venture doesn't have a physical feedback loop that tells him if it's doing good or working.

Instead, he's playing with the delicate, precarious nature of information in the internet age—something that is already in crisis and now is being chipped away at by one rich dude who gets off on crisis. And what blows my mind most is that in the process of all of this, Musk is undermining his own dream, his own vision. This is a sentiment I heard from the employees and colleagues of Elon Musk. They felt betrayed—like this man pushed them to think differently, to do things that seemed impossible, all in the name of this grand vision of what humanity could be, what we could do as a civilization.

And yet in recent years, he seems to be sabotaging that very vision, alienating the people and customers that he needs to bring this vision to life. In my mind, Elon has exchanged that vision for controversy and division that forces all of us to talk about it—here we are, talking about it, talking about him. I think a part of him loves that or needs that, and yet after all of this, defenders of Elon will continue to argue that only someone like this could be the one to change the world.

To anyone I've