Elon Musk Is Winning - The Atlantic. By Charlie Warzel

Read time: 6 minutes

Twitter has always been in the doomscrolling business, and business is booming.

Photograph of Elon Musk

Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters / Redux

July 21, 2024, 10:22 PM ET

Let’s face it, Twitter isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The platform is a lot like a cockroach. It is ugly, skittering, repulsive, and incredibly difficult—despite many efforts—to kill. Elon Musk purchased the network in late 2022, treated its power users with disdain, haphazardly fired much of its workforce, alienated its advertisers, insisted on calling it X, and turned it into a vehicle for an edgelordian political project. People left in droves. And yet somehow, at this moment in 2024, X has the juice.

It’s still a rat’s nest of reckless speculation, angry partisans, and toxicity, but it’s also alive in a way that’s hard to quantify. Joe Biden’s shocking performance at the presidential debate in late June set my timeline ablaze in a way it hadn’t been since 2021. When a gunman shot at Donald Trump eight days ago, the platform did what it does best, offering a mix of conspiracy theorizing, up-to-the-second hard-news reporting, and, perhaps most crucial, a notion of communal spectating (which, despite the awfulness, is genuinely addictive). The past three weeks have been extraordinarily chaotic, full of the kind of infighting, violence, and spectacle that X was built to help document and even fuel. All of that culminated this afternoon when Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the presidential race with a series of posts on the platform. X has always been in the doomscrolling business, and business is booming.

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If you step back, though, you may notice how awkward this situation is: Joe Biden chose to make one of the biggest announcements in presidential history on a social-media site owned and operated by one of his opponent’s biggest donors and most vocal supporters. Musk reacted to the news by posting about how his “smartest friends” are voting for Trump and by compulsively replying “Trump/Vance LFG!!” to people on X.

Biden’s staff posted the news on X because they must have understood that, for better or worse, it is the quickest, least mediated way to inject information into the bloodstream of political and cultural discourse. (As Musk remarked about the mainstream media this afternoon: “They’re so slow.”) That X is back to its old ways means journalists, pundits, consultants, lawmakers, and hyper-engaged political hobbyists have all settled back into the familiar pattern of refreshing the app to consume news in the 24-second news cycle. “Among other things this should be the moment that brings all the liberal exiles back to Twitter/X,” the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posted shortly after Biden’s announcement. “Nobody’s ever escaping this platform now.”

Although I don’t imagine that Musk’s platform is going to see a historic influx of new users, Douthat’s point about inescapability feels right. For people who are addicted to political mayhem or need to monitor or report on it for the next four months, avoiding X is going to be extremely difficult.

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When Musk acquired Twitter, my favorite explanation for what he bought came from The Verge’s Nilay Patel, who argued that the platform’s greatest asset was not its technology, but the addled “politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway.” Nobody fit this description better than Musk, an inveterate poster. Patel, writing as if he was speaking to Musk, concluded: “You just bought yourself for $44 billion.”

This is still true, but with hindsight it’s also clear that he purchased the ability to remodel the platform fairly dramatically in his image. Arguably, he went too far. During the first 18 months of his tenure, the platform seemed to revolve around Musk’s own posts and personality. This was partly algorithmic—Musk reportedly asked engineers to boost his posts—and partly cultural. Musk became Twitter’s proprietor and perpetual main character. The platform’s “For You” recommendation feed felt, at times, almost curated by Musk, full of the same stale memes, Reddit-flavored viral slop, and edgelord humor that the billionaire shared via his own account.

But Musk’s stewardship may also have shifted the Overton window, especially among his peers in Silicon Valley—namely, venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen, who has flirted with the right by railing against “wokism” on the platform for years. Musk has used his account to help launch Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s failed presidential campaign as well as to reinstate the banned accounts of conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, trolls, and, of course, Trump himself; Musk’s decision to use X to explicitly advance the Trumpist political project has pushed the social network even more to the right, according to one Pew Research Center report. Among pundits who spend a lot of time on the platform, the vibe has clearly changed. It makes sense that, as Musk’s influence shifts the platform to the right, his contemporaries feel comfortable following suit. As the venture capitalist Ben Horowitz said on his podcast last week: “The future of our business, the future of technology, new technology, and the future of America is really at stake … We think Donald Trump is actually the right choice. Sorry, Mom.”

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Silicon Valley venture capitalists are not, outside fundraising, a key electoral demographic—and perhaps this “mask off” moment has merely revealed sentiments that were there all along. Still, any consideration of Musk’s role highlights the truth about what he really bought: a still-important communication channel that, while open to all, may be influenced by his own grudges and ideologies in both subtle and very direct ways.

Wealthy and powerful men have long owned influential media properties and used them in explicitly political ways, but Musk’s sole executorship of X is slightly different. The site has always felt more like an informational commons than an actual journalistic arm. Now reinvigorated users must wrestle with a difficult question: Should we continue to outsource the liveliest parts of our political conversation to a platform owned by a far-right activist?

In a perfect world, the answer would be a straightforward no. But those who oppose Musk and Trump have reasons to stay. There is the argument that ceding X’s political battleground to the right would be foolish—that staying and waging an ideological fight is both noble and politically savvy. Another line of thinking I’ve heard among journalist peers is that it’s unwise to give up the large audiences that many have built on the platform. If the goal is to inform, you want the largest megaphone.

But staying has its risks. It gives Musk that much more influence over the political discourse, to be conducted on a platform whose algorithms privilege the very rage-bait and reductive engagement that led Musk to become its most famous and well-followed user.

Whether you’re concerned about Musk’s ownership at this point probably depends on your ideology or your viewpoint on Twitter’s relevance. Today, as Trump supporters struggled to make sense of a new campaign landscape, one far-right influencer in my feed issued an all-caps plea: “GET TRUMP BACK ON X NOW!” It was yet another admission that this comparatively small platform still feels like it matters. But there’s another way to interpret right-wing shitposters begging for a Trump return: If X actually matters, if it moves the political needle, why is it that the biggest personality in American politics—the person who cemented the website’s status in the firmament of political discourse—doesn’t post? The answer is that Trump now has his own platform, Truth Social, which he began posting on after Twitter temporarily banned him after January 6. Trump’s account has technically been reactivated on X, but the only thing he’s posted since 2021 is his own mugshot to promote his website.

Musk bought a substantial amount of influence for $44 billion. But his political idol is, for now, still his competitor.

About the Author

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.