In late April, Elon Musk blasted out a tweet that you may be seeing a lot this morning. A week and change out from what appeared like an epic, Musk-type jape at buying Twitter, a 420 joke embedded in the offer price, the South African billionaire posited his thesis for the project.
It was immediately apparent that the thin-skinned Musk couldn’t keep up this ruse for long. Now, less than two months into his project to “just hear out” the guy who founded the Daily Stormer, Musk is banning journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere who merely cover him with an ounce of scrutiny.
Musk’s response — on Twitter, naturally, and not in the form of an interview — is that these journalists violated his “doxxing policy,” which refers to reporting on or retweeting the @ElonJet account, which tracks the location of Musk’s private jet. Setting aside that the location of the jet is public information and accessible to anyone who wants to look, Musk claimed that these tweets were “assassination coordinates.”
Now, he’s suing the owner of the account, a 20-year-old named Jack Sweeney, after claims that a stalker jumped on the hood of a car containing his child X Æ A-12. He’s also booting anyone to the left of weev for what he’s claiming are violations of Twitter’s safety rules.
Thursday night, December 15, Musk popped into a Twitter Spaces event held by Buzzfeed reporter Katie Notopoulos about the recent bans, scolded the journalists in there about posting real-time flight data, rage-quit when they pushed back, and then eliminated the feature completely.
At least for now, Musk says that Spaces will be back at some point Friday, December 16, but it’s hard to look at that tweet from April without your eyes rolling out of your head and plonking onto the floor. Those “worst critics” are ready and willing to post images of Musk’s PayPal-era hairline, disappearing like an Arctic glacier, but they all have seven-day bans because a guy with too much money to care really, really does.
The billionaire has proven once more that Twitter is the digital town square, but only if you’re a right-wing Onion clone that forgot to import punch lines or if you feel like making fun of trans people. Anything else requires approval from the sole mod, who moves the goalposts as he sees fit, and is incapable of logging off.