We Are All Flawed, Each and Every One of Us

The most useful parts of my quite long life were my mistakes and disasters. I have a number of close friends who slid through their lives as if by magic, achieving wealth and even a certain amount of fame. But when you need advice, they haven’t a thing to offer.

Failure and the courage to keep on going with the house burning down is where we learn the lessons that a smooth and easy ride will never teach us. As Will Rogers once said, “good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

If you’re desperate for help at 2am and don’t know where to turn, dial up a friend who has both failed and come back from the brink. He’s your guy. Might as easily be she’s your girl.

And so we come to Elon Musk and his purchase of Twitter

You knew I’d dream up a specter of doom to back my thesis and Elon is handy. Interesting guy, Mr. Musk, because he breaks so many norms. As the richest man on the planet, he must be doing something right. But few take the time to understand the many brinks he’s come back from.

He’s an engineering guy and, like Thomas Edison, willing to sleep on the floor and get along on almost no time off when the circumstances require. Both men had huge egos, but Edison had his mostly under control and Elon’s loves to start fires and then pour gasoline on them.

Twitter brings out Musk’s most vulnerable tendencies, yet he’s drawn to it like a moth to a flame

With over a hundred million followers, Twitter is Elon’s most powerful public persona. Abraham Lincoln said that “if you want to judge a man’s character, give him power.” He didn’t say ‘give him money’ and I sometimes wonder if Elon hasn’t confused the two. Tesla makes money, bales and bundles and truckloads of it. So does SpaceX.

But Twitter is not a moneymaker—not on the scale of paying 44 billion dollars for it. The ten year stock market average return, adjusted for inflation, is a shade over 12%. That means the $44 billion Musk invested should return a little over $5.25 billion a year.

Chaotic and crass: a brief timeline of Elon Musk’s history with Twitter

According to the Guardian UK article, Musk’s activity has in some cases cost him dearly. In August 2018, he posted that he had funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share – a joking reference to marijuana. But the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concluded after investigation the tweets had no basis in fact and hurt investors, issuing two separate fines to Musk and Tesla of $20m.

Oops, a $40 million slap on the wrist. And people say tweets are free.

Part of that 2018 settlement included a clause that Musk would have legal counsel approve tweets about Tesla in advance to ensure they do not contain market-moving news. Musk, unsurprisingly, has not abided by those conditions, flippantly wiping $14bn off Tesla’s value in 2020 with a tweet stating that “Tesla stock price is too high”.

I guess when the boss says the stock price is too high, the market responds accordingly

$14 billion’s a helluva price to pay for slapping your own wrist.

Musk again ran into SEC troubles when in 2021 he tweeted a poll about whether to sell his stock and proceeded to do just that. The Tesla CEO and his brother are now under investigation for insider trading relating to whether Musk told his brother in advance that he would tweet the poll.

The frequent investigations and legal actions have rankled Musk, whose lawyer said in a legal filing in March that the SEC investigations constitute “outsized efforts calculated to chill [Musk’s] exercise of First Amendment rights”.

It seems to me you can’t get any further inside than the CEO, but I could be wrong

All of which suggests that a man for whom $44 million is pretty much pocket change simply decided to buy the damned thing and run it according to his personal concept of free speech.

It will be fascinating to see how all that plays out

So far (and we are only a few days into it) he fired the board of directors, all the chief executives and half the operating staff, making himself what he calls Chief Twit.

Further, Elon’s idea of free speech is quite different that that of the European Union and the EU has made it quite evident that their laws will prevail.

(Washington Post)Tweeting outrageous accusations, as Musk has done before, is a profound abuse of free speech, all the more unsettling as he takes the reins of Twitter’s policies for content moderation.

Commentators in China are now lobbying the billionaire to remove the label “Chinese state-affiliated media” that Twitter has given them.

There are reportedly hundreds of Chinese state media accounts broadcasting propaganda each day. What happens when many of them start asking Musk to remove their labels so they aren’t so easily identified? What happens if the government of China — one of Tesla’s biggest sources of vehicle production and sales — suggests it might rein in Musk’s expansion of Tesla manufacturing in the country if Twitter doesn’t comply?

It’s not so hard to see the governments of Brazil or India (an untapped and likely lucrative market for Tesla) making similar demands about content regulation to Twitter’s chief twit. 

Then there’s the embarrassing matter of Saudi investment

Musk is now the company’s sole director, its Chief Twit, a name that cracks me up. My dictionary defines a twit as “someone who is regarded as contemptible,” so perhaps ‘Chief Tweet’ might have been a wiser choice linguistically. But the Saudi kingdom’s known use of the platform as a propaganda tool, and its harsh crackdown on dissidents or others who use the platform, are areas of concern for human rights experts.

It's going to be fascinating to watch Elon become his own most problematic tweeter on a social media platform he barely understands. We’ll all have front-row seats.

“It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so”
–Will Rogers