What Musk’s past tweets reveal about Twitter’s next owner

PROVIDENCE, R.I. –

Three days earlier than Elon Musk agreed to purchase Twitter, the world’s richest man tweeted a photograph of Invoice Gates and used a crude sexual time period to make enjoyable of his stomach.

Playful, aggressive and infrequently juvenile, Musk’s previous tweets present how he has used social media to craft his public picture as a brash billionaire unafraid to offend. They could additionally reveal clues as to how Musk will govern the platform he hopes to personal.

“Take a look at the feed: It is everywhere. It is erratic. At occasions it is fairly excessive,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse College professor who research social media and who lately assigned Musk’s tweets as studying materials for his or her college students.

“It paints him as some type of insurgent chief who will take management of the general public sq. to reserve it. That could be a fantasy he has constructed.”

Musk joined Twitter in 2010 and now has greater than 85 million followers — the seventh most of any account and the best for any enterprise chief. He had mused about shopping for the positioning earlier than he agreed on Monday to pay $44 billion for Twitter, which he said he hopes to show right into a haven the place all speech is allowed.

“I hope that even my worst critics stay on Twitter, as a result of that’s what free speech means,” Musk wrote in a tweet.   

Because the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk makes use of his Twitter account to make enterprise bulletins and promote his enterprises. He muses about expertise and commerce, however has additionally posted jokes about ladies’s breasts and as soon as in contrast Canada’s prime minister to Hitler. He repeatedly weighs in on international occasions, as he did in March 2020 when he tweeted that “The coronavirus pandemic is dumb.”

He is additionally used the account to punch again at critics, resembling when he referred to as a diver working to rescue boys trapped in a collapse Thailand a “pedo,” brief for pedophile. The diver had beforehand criticized Musk’s proposal to make use of a sub to rescue the boys. Musk, who received a defamation swimsuit filed by the diver, later said he by no means supposed “pedo” to be interpreted as “pedophile.”

Just a few years in the past, after software program engineer Cher Scarlett criticized Musk’s dealing with of the cave incident, the tech billionaire fired again and she or he was quickly being harassed by dozens of Musk’s on-line followers. He later deleted the posts, however not earlier than Scarlett needed to lock down her account as a result of she was receiving so many hateful messages.

“It is ironic to me that anyone who claims they need to purchase Twitter to guard free speech has such skinny pores and skin,” she said. “He is a really good man, and when he replies to people who criticize him, he is aware of what he is doing. To me that is not championing free speech, it is weaponizing free speech, and I believe that is what he’ll do proudly owning this platform.”

Nineteen-year-old Jack Sweeney obtained Musk’s consideration when he created an automatic Twitter account that tracked the actions of Musk’s jet. Musk responded by providing Sweeney $5,000 to tug the account. When Sweeney refused, Musk blocked him on Twitter.

Sweeney said he is anxious he could get kicked off the positioning fully if Musk’s takeover is accredited. However he said he likes Musk’s free speech absolutism, and hopes he sees it by.

“He’ll make it extra open, and I believe that is a great factor,” Sweeney said.

Musk’s use of Twitter has additionally led to issues for his personal firms. In a single August 2018 tweet, for example, Musk asserted that he had the funding to take Tesla non-public for $420 a share, though a courtroom has dominated that it wasn’t true. That led to an SEC investigation that Musk continues to be preventing.

Extra lately, Musk appeared to have violated SEC guidelines that required him to reveal that he’d acquired a 5% stake in Twitter; as a substitute he waited till he had greater than 9%. Specialists say these points aren’t more likely to have an effect on his Twitter acquisition.

Final yr one other federal company, the Nationwide Labor Relations Board, ordered Musk to delete a tweet that officers said illegally threatened to chop inventory choices for Tesla staff who joined the United Auto Employees union.

These tweets helped cement Musk’s popularity as a brash outsider, a workingman’s billionaire, Grygiel said. However that does not imply he’s geared up to run a social media platform with greater than 200 million customers, the professor added.

“Possibly he desires to burn it down,” Grygiel said. “I do not know. However I do know that it exhibits that nobody individual ought to have this sort of energy.”