Elon Musk is a person who has sparked many a controversy, and yet he’s being hailed as a hero, a visionary, and a messiah by his followers who bought into his act. There are many facets to the persona that Musk puts on and the way that many people buy into it is resembling a hive mind of sorts.

Hence, I wanted to write a post about this.

Naturally, I’ll also talk about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the slow descent into ruination that followed for a platform that many deemed irreplaceable… but I wanted to shine a light on and raise awareness about ideologies and agendas that Musk has been pandering towards as well as a bunch of things that aren’t talked about enough.

Hence, this post will feature political content, mentions of conspiracy theories, antisemitism, transphobia, and other topics that may not be appropriate for every person.

1. Twitter – A Brief Summary of Its History
2. Twitter – A Free Speech Platform?
3. Who is Musk anyway?
4. Musk’s problematic tweets
5. Musk panders to racists, sexists, transphobes and the far-right
6. Musk is a grifter
   1. Musk is critically unfunny (Bonus)

Twitter – A Brief Summary of Its History

Originally, Twitter was created and launched by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in 2006. By 2012, more than 100 million users tweeted roughly 340 million tweets a day, an impressive number that’d be dwarfed as time went on.

The rise to popularity sort of started around this tipping point of the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference where screens were set up to broadcast tweets about the event to people attending.

The platform continued to grow from then onwards. In 2011, Twitter hit 100 million monthly active users. In 2012, Twitter announced double that. In 2016, Twitter’s shares rose 20% after a report of takeover approaches by Alphabet, Microsoft, Verizon, Disney, and others.

At the time, Twitter’s board of directors were open to a deal – but no deal was made since reportedly all potential buyers dropped out due to concerns over the image, abuse and harassment.

I bring this up because, before Elon Musk purchased 9.1% of Twitter for $2.64 billion in April of 2022 and before he was appointed to Twitter’s board on April 9th, there were already concerns about abuse and harassment hindering the freedom of expression and freedom of speech of many users.

Musk thought otherwise (Verge, Guardian), raising concerns about “censorship on the platform” and “a lack of free speech”. Hence, on April 20th, Musk secured $46.5 billion in funding as a tender offer which later was accepted by the board.

On July 8th, Elon announced he was terminating this based on claims of “maternal breach” to which Twitter’s board chair Bret Taylor pledged to pursue legal action to complete the acquisition.

To me it sounded like Elon was looking for any excuse to not get into this deal, either because he himself knew that he was full of shit or because his advisors raised the same concerns that those other potential buyers’ advisors raised. Twitter is a cesspool, after all. There’s hardly any worth to it.

On October 4th, 2022, Musk proceeded with the deal at the original offer price, closing the deal on October 27th, acquiring the company wholly for about $44 billion.

By January of this year, Twitter only had around 2,300 employees left, according to Musk, with only 550 working full-time. By April, 800 more were fired – with 80% of Twitter’s workforce gone in a year.

And well, now, the website is barely working.

Twitter is loading slower by the day. BlueTicks are everywhere – aka “people that paid for Twitter”, many of which are far-right accounts – and the algorithm has been changed to specifically check how Musk’s tweets are doing: Tracking metrics for users reportedly are broken up into four groups, including “power_user”, “republican”, “democrat”, and “Elon”.

Make of that what you will.

And well, nowadays, Twitter is still around although the algorithm keeps recommending a lot of negativity to users with a “For You” page that tries to rage-bait people into engaging more with the platform, a common tactic for successful social media networks. After all, if you get annoyed or insulted by something you see, you’re more likely to spend time on it.

On top of that, Twitter has been renamed to “X” which is just a very weird thing to do, especially as the domain still stays “twitter.com” for very obvious reasons. This rebrand is just there, I guess, to make Elon feel powerful. A lot of the terms of service still state that the platform is called Twitter.

The headlines do not end there, of course, but I’m sure you can find countless other examples online of a child wanting a toy and not liking it anymore once it has its hands on it. Musk is that child. It’s not the most profitable business decision he’s made but he tries to slaughter the blue bird for as much money as he can, even going as far as selling old Twitter handles.

Twitter – A Free Speech Platform?

To discuss whether or not Twitter is or has been a free speech platform is difficult without talking about free speech as a concept. The reason why I bring this up is because it became Musk’s credo and agenda for the longest time, leading up to the purchase.

Free Speech or freedom of speech is defined as “the legal right to express one’s opinions freely”. This essentially boils down to the ability to talk about topics, share opinions, and essentially speak without censorship or restraint.

That said, whereas freedom of speech is an important pillar of democracy, so is the concept of “human dignity”. In Germany, one of our constitution’s most important aspects is the inviolable nature of human dignity. No human shall face discrimination, harassment or persecution for their sex, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, race, political stance, etc.

While it’s true that people should be able to express their opinions without restraint or censorship, it is also true that we can never violate someone’s dignity. In fact, this aspect is much more important than anyone being able to express their opinions. Without that aspect of democracy, we’ll end up experiencing genocide and manslaughter again, history tends to repeat itself. Hence, we need to protect human dignity and human rights. Always Remember, eh?

Free speech ends where a person’s or a group’s dignity starts. Hence, the laws of most democracies differentiate between “free speech” and “hate speech”, with the former being any person’s given right and the latter being a crime that violates any person’s dignity.

Back to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: This means that to have “freedom of speech”, “freedom of expression”, “freedom of religion” and “freedom of the press”, one needs to think about whether or not the messages are violating people’s dignity.

Hate speech is defined as “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds”, meaning that any utterings that are hateful, abusive or threatening based on these grounds are not “free speech” but just crimes.

Freedom of Speech doesn’t refer to Freedom of Consequences.

If a tweet is taken down because it entices violence, targets a minority or threatens a group or person, then that’s not censorship… it’s just the consequence of a person violating laws and terms of services.

Musk speaks of a “lack of free speech” on the platform but doesn’t go into detail about it. He alludes to instances when Twitter banned accounts for being hateful, ran polls on whether they should be reinstated, and then invited those accounts back to Twitter, on a whim.

Kanye West, banned for antisemitic remarks, was reinstated like that (and then banned later again for the same reasons). Andrew Tate, banned for derogatory and hateful remarks regarding women, was also brought back to Twitter. (For more examples, see here.)

I’m pretty sure that bringing back people that limit other people’s freedom of speech is not the way to go to create a “free speech haven”, as Musk wanted to create. Oh, look a nice article on the matter!

While we’re here, free speech and freedom of the press come up often in Musk’s tweets.

In Musk’s “free speech haven”, journalists should also theoretically be able to express any views without fear of restraint or censorship, right?

Well,… Twitter is no free speech haven under Musk with him suspending journalists that talked negatively about him.

I guess it’s only censorship when other people do it or when they take down Trump but not when the platform takes down journalists that criticize Twitter’s new overlord. Odd, eh?

But perhaps, journalists who are vocal with their criticisms of Musk get silenced because it’s bad for business.

It’s almost as if his views are influenced by how much money he can make off of them.

If people call out his hypocrisy, his cult may catch on to the fact that Elon is a grifter, so it’s better to ban them, even if it is hypocritical.

Who is Musk anyway?

Elon Reeve Musk is the founder, chairman, CEO and chief technology officer of SpaceX, CEO and CTO of Tesla, owner, chairman and CTO of X Corp, founder of the Boring Company, co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, and president of the Musk Foundation.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, to Errol and Maye Musk, he lived there before eventually immigrating to Canada at the age of 18.

In a now-archived article, Musk stated that his father “also had a share in an emerald mine in Zambia” but having owned shares in an emerald mine in Apartheid South Africa is not a great look, which would explain why Musk is so adamant about denying that part, something Musk kept tweeting about in 2019. They were insanely wealthy, either way, even if Musk tries to sell his success story as a “teller-washer to millionaire” type of pipe dream.

Musk’s grandfather and namesake was an anti-semite, btw.

Anyhow, Musk eventually was estranged from his father, migrated over to Canada with 4,000$ to his name (not exactly as poor as he claims, eh?), went to a bunch of universities and then co-founded Zip2, an online city guide software company, together with his brother Kimbal. This later was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in ’99, and with $12 million of the money made this way, Musk co-founded “X.com”, a direct bank, in the same year – which later merged with Confinity in 2000, to form PayPal.

On that note, Musk claims to have founded PayPal himself when his previous company simply merged with another. Merging with another company to create something doesn’t mean that you’re the sole founder of it. You’re a co-founder. Big difference.

Musk later was ousted btw… but he was permitted to keep his equity stake in PayPal – something he’d get rewarded for when the company was acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, netting Musk $250 million. He had “thoughts about assassination attempts”, to quote him directly, but it appears that holding off was really rewarding for him in the end. Huh.

With $100 million of the money he “made”, Musk founded SpaceX. In 2014, he became an early investor in Tesla, later assuming the position of CEO in 2008, making him the 4th CEO of Tesla.

The founders and creators of Tesla, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, did talk about all this as well in this CNBC article over here, so I’d recommend giving that a read… but in essence, while Musk claims that he was the founder of Tesla, he wasn’t… at all. It’s a hoax. A lie created by him to make himself seem like a genius of sorts.

Musk later went on to found OpenAI in 2015, co-founding Neuralink in 2016, as well as The Boring Company, before eventually acquiring Twitter in 2022 and founding xAI in March 2023.

To sum this section up, Musk is an entrepreneur and he knows what to do with his money. That’s true. He made many good decisions and he knows how to sell himself.

That said, as I noted a few times already, he likes to lie to make himself appear bigger than he is.

He claims to have found PayPal. He claims to have founded Tesla…

All of that to appear like a driven and self-less business-mogul who always has his sights on some target, some big plan that we can’t possibly comprehend, he makes up all sorts of projects, ideas and predictions… like with the Hyper Loop, a concept rooted in Sci-Fi that just doesn’t work and is too expensive to be good, anyway, or with robo taxies that still don’t work the way he claims they would.

Musk has a history of failing upwards. A lot of his success stories appear to be coincidences that he profited immensely from and it’s clear that it got to his head.

The “lore” of having been a poor student with lots of student debt, for instance, was created by him so that people sympathize with him – and yet the story falls apart when one realises that he got a scholarship hence preventing him from acquiring a six-figure debt… but people don’t look at the conflicting statements. What people want is a dream to believe in and a messiah to guide them, they don’t want to be called out for believing in lies.

Musk’s problematic tweets

To call Elon Musk an anti-semite would probably be something I could get sued for… so I won’t do that. But what I can say is that Elon Musk says a lot of things that are antisemitic. Being named after his antisemitic grandfather may have influenced him a little too much.

In May of 2023, Musk tweeted that “Soros reminds [him] of Magneto”.

Magneto is a fictional character who survived the holocaust and who was coined by those experiences in his motivations. George Soros is a real holocaust survivor who gets attacked non-stop for a plethora of reasons like this as well. He founded the Open Society Foundation which has given away more than $30B to advance justice, education, public health and independent media in the world.

Soros is a controversial figure due to the amount of money he made by ultimately manipulating markets. Still, despite that, Soros has contributed to furthering a great many causes, doing a lot of philanthropic work, and protecting values that Musk claims to also care about.

Anyhow, when people speak of “Soros”, it’s a dog whistle. They don’t necessarily mean George Soros. “Soros” stands for “Jewish control” and other conspiracies about rich, angry Jewish people planning the demise of Western Civilisation.

Musk himself states in this tweet: “He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”

BTW, Musk supposedly only started attacking Soros after Soros sold a small stake in Tesla, so Elon suddenly attacked Soros like this. It’s almost as if his views are influenced by how much money he can make off them.

Musk panders to antisemitic conspiracies and he’s fully aware of it, which is why he is so explicit about it. Yet, he backpaddles from that when he’s confronted by Jewish people. He knows that it’s bad. He didn’t want to visit any of the camps when invited, saying he “already knows all about it” which is a weird take and something he backpaddled from later without apologizing.

These comments and his statements about “Soros” (whether he means the actual person or the dog whistle is irrelevant) were criticized often and Musk proclaimed himself “basically Jewish” and defended his opinions and antisemitic outbursts by stating that he’s “Pro-Semite”, which is a term that isn’t used because it validates anti-semitism as just another view that people could have, btw.

Musk panders to racists, sexists, transphobes and the far-right

Musk hasn’t just dabbled in antisemitism but also decided to try out other forms of hate speech and conspiracy theories. Hence, here are some more examples.

Musk doesn’t just express views and statements that could be seen as problematic but he defends them, proclaims that he can say whatever he wants and continues to pander towards different hate groups, while also cuddling with Putin and Erdogan.

In October of 2022, Musk proclaimed pro-Russian viewpoints concerning the Ukraine-Russia crisis, apparently wanting Ukraine to cede territories to Russia. Here’s a poll he hosted on this. Macabre.

There were also claims floating around of Musk sending messages to Putin, as well as Musk having talked to Putin, although Musk denies the latter.

Musk denied a request that Ukraine made regarding the Starlink Satelite setup that they needed to fend off drone attacks, ultimately playing a big part on the battlefield for which he’s criticized.

Being a “free speech absolutist” (and possibly Pro-Putin), Musk also refuses to block Russian state media and propaganda on his Starlink Satelite network, especially during the ongoing war. As previously mentioned, Musk has no qualms about removing journalists and performing censorship. It’s just that he won’t perform censorship when it comes to Putin (or Erdogan) but he criticizes propaganda by other states.

Obviously, I don’t know whether or not he does get paid by Russia to do this but he likes to fanboy a lot about Russia and Putin.

Musk is really thirsty for that Vladussy.

Funny little side note on the matter of censorship: Musk introduced the “Community Notes” feature to combat misinformation and as it turns out, the Community Notes according to him work flawlessly, unless they correct him. In which case they’re wrong and stupid. Musk is right about them being stupid, given that the Notes feature is reportedly adding to misinformation and that it’s incredibly prone to being abused by outside groups to spread propaganda.

Musk is a bit of a manchild. Musk shouldn’t have issues with my stating my honest opinion. This is a free-speech country, after all, right? We value free speech here, right? Because if we don’t allow for insults as mild as those, then we probably shouldn’t publish statements likening Trudeau to Hitler in a meme he deleted afterwards? “Free speech” aka slanderous comments.

In 2022, Musk tweeted out in support of the Canada convoy protest which was funded by far-right activists… and he kept harping on about this stuff.

Despite being against censorship, Musk has been rather weak on Erdogan’s censorship requests during Erdogan’s campaign earlier this year, supporting his campaign and actively helping political censorship despite being against it. Musk claims to have learned that the Nazis during WW2 were “very big on censorship”, and yet here we are, with him spreading lies.

Speaking of lying, in November of 2022, Musk said that he wouldn’t ban the Twitter account tracking his jet… but then… he still did it because a man’s word means nothing to Elon.

When Scott Adams likened Black people to a hate group in February of 2023, Musk defended him and proclaimed there was “some truth in that”… Wait what? Perhaps Musk’s grandfather rubbed off too much on Musk.

Contrary to Elon’s views, Musk’s father was Anti-Apartheid. Meanwhile, Tesla was sued over racial segregation claims. Fun stuff.

There are also many allegations regarding sexism and a toxic frat boy culture at Tesla, with frequent groping being an issue in Tesla’s factories. Musk seems to care less about this as he sets an example by contributing to sexism in the tech industry with a “tits” tweet.

Musk also has issues with LGBTQIA+ rights, frequently tweeting memes about him being happy about Pride Month being over, some of which he tends to delete because they’re a bad look. He’s also very vocal about his opposition to trans rights. He even disowned his trans child. At the same time, though, he’s totally okay queer rights, including trans rights, at least according to his own tweets that are still up. It’s weird because it’s almost as if his views are influenced by how much money he can make off them.

Twitter also quietly removed a section in the Terms of Service about deadnaming. Musk also proclaimed that his pronouns are “Persecute/Fauci” (for which he’s been dubbed a “far-right activist”) and that “Pronouns suck”, so he appears to also be against the English language and words such as “I, Me, My” despite those being his favourite words.

Elon Musk is also an avid enemy of public transport… because he’s rich and because he doesn’t like crowded spaces – the latter is understandable to a degree… but to oppose something beneficial to all people who aren’t rich and who cannot afford private jets like him is weird. Not to mention that his response to arguments against this stance was just him calling someone an idiot. He previously stated his interest in removing public transport out of the equation altogether in since-deleted tweets. Wild shit.

Musk also has been accused of spreading misinformation regarding vaccines and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. He previously called the pandemic “dumb”, claimed he’d make ventilators if there was a shortage (but didn’t do so), was called a Space Karen, and he’s praised anti-vaxx comments made on SNL.

Despite his queerphobic remarks and views, Musk more recently turned 180° and actually “celebrated” the queer community in a series of tweets. Musk is truly a man of integrity.

It’s almost as if his views are influenced by how much money he can make off of them.

Musk is a grifter

Musk sells a success story to people: The teller-washer who came to a foreign country and became a millionaire. The self-made man, so to speak.

People want to believe him because it’d be great if it was like that. If any person could become filthy rich and spineless like Musk, why not them? As such, people suck up to him, creating this hivemind of Musk followers hence resulting in me frequently calling him “Elmo” when I speak about him online.

Throughout his career of successfully moving money around from one place to another, he’s told many lies… but he always got away with it. I doubt this will ever change and I don’t think lying is the biggest issue here… but he acts as if he never lies and is hence hailed as a messiah and prophet of sorts.

Musk panders to the far-right because they’re easy to indoctrinate but he also panders to the left because it makes him money. He’s rainbow capitalism incarnate despite claiming to be very much against that stuff.

It’s almost as if his views are influenced by how much money he can make off them.

We don’t know what Musk’s actual views are, aside from the fact that he really likes money. Grifting, for him, is just another Tuesday. He backed politicians like DeSantis who allowed a predator to be around kids which is pretty darn problematic – and yet he’s against corruption and companies paying politicians, according to his own tweets.

While Twitter has a zero-tolerance child sexual exploitation policy, Musk happily welcomes someone back who posted child sex abuse imagery onto Twitter. Musk, who may have sexually harassed and bothered a flight attendant, is also accused of discriminating against Moms at Tesla… and there is more. Musk is suspending folks who call him a paedophile and yet he previously called others paedophiles in the same way they did. It’s like he’s not even self-aware of what he’s doing. Calling others groomers and paedophiles is incredibly damning, but perhaps that’s too much for Musk to understand.

As you may be able to tell, Musk is a person who values money, power and fame over anything. He is not interested in any people around him but rather in the worth, they may have for him.

It’s almost as if his views are influenced by how much-

You get it.

He’s a problematic person but gets away with everything because he’s rich, he’s a cis-man and he’s white. He’s the epitome of privilege.

I’m not saying all this and pointing at different controversies to paint him as the big evil in the world… but rather to raise awareness that he is a spineless moron that changes his political views more often than his underwear. Musk doesn’t care about folks but he acts as if he does.

On Twitter, he frequently takes down community notes that correct him to really keep his image as a genius intact. At the same time, he praises the system for its accuracy and effectiveness in fighting fake news… which he originally was in support of… free-speech sanctuary and all that.

Musk isn’t the devil or anything. Of course not, but he’d make a deal with the devil if he could profit from that, and he’d afterwards claim that he’d never do that.

I don’t know if he’s actually an antisemite, sexist, racist and fascist. I won’t call him so, at least. But he does say a lot of problematic things. Whether or not he’s an antisemite is not something I can decide, he just happens to pander to nazis and casually sound like them, too.

Since I started writing this post, countless things came up, and as such, Elon Musk kept adding more and more things that I could possibly write about, including the mistreatment of his family members, his talk with Donald Trump where they fantasize about women in power and deny climate change amongst other things, and many other things.

I think the biggest problem with Elon Musk is that he keeps failing upwards. He’s so good at manipulating the people around and under him to the point that he’s ended up creating a whole cult that would do atrocious things just for a chance to attain even a single drop of Elmo’s sweat… not that Musk sweats. He’s too rich for that.

I don’t think people should “hate” Musk or anything but they should be aware of how much damage he does via his huge platform that he uses to spread misinformation, hate speech and wild conspiracies. And every year he adds onto that.

Musk is critically unfunny (Bonus)

But let’s not forget the most important thing that I haven’t even talked about yet… Musk is critically unfunny. Clearly I’m not just adding this onto this post to also spread awareness on just how bad Musk’s joke is and about how big of a manchild he is. Clearly, nobody would expect a billionaire like Musk to shadowban a singular tweet because it hurt his feelings. Nope. Never. I wonder who did that.

Note: This section is not important at all. The post is over. This one is just a bonus.

Anyway, Evan shared this wild interaction between Hard Drive and Musk earlier this year.

The Hard Drive wrote an article about the zodiac killer letter being solved by opening it with VLC Media Player. Musk shared the headline but cropped out the credit, intentionally, which Hard Drive’s Twitter account quickly pointed out, and Musk then answers to this by…

• saying that it’s okay to steal it since their article look like memes and someone just cropped it out (???)
• it’s only a 6/10 meme, so they shouldn’t complain (why share it then?)
• “the selfless art of anonymous meme creators is something to be admired” (???)

And then Hard Drive shared this article here about Musk only wanting to go to Mars because nobody hates him there yet… after which Musk replied: “Less funny than SNL on a bad day” to which Hard Drive had to say that Musk’s an expert on SNL’s bad days. And then Musk made it so that you cannot find the replies to the thread anymore without searching… and he deleted his original tweet. Wow.

There is a Hard Drive article btw where they “apologize for dunking on him too hard“.

Anyway, this was just a bonus section that I added in here because it felt important enough to add here since very clearly Musk isn’t human since humour is a very human thing. Lizards don’t have humour. I see a pattern. This is freedom of speech, Musk, apparently, at least according to you. Time to get banned from Twitter. Have a good day.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.