One morning in December 2022, Musk tweeted: “My pronouns are Judge/Fauci.” Full attack on the anti-Covid policy led by former White House health adviser Anthony Fauci. And a disdain displayed for transgender people who sometimes specify in their profile which pronouns they identify with. This double-bladed mockery harvests 1.2 million “likes” and revolts a powerless Democratic camp. Musk is the new prince of the kingdom: a few weeks earlier, the man of the year 2021, according to Time, put on the table 44 billion dollars to afford Twitter. Registered on the network for a decade, Musk has always been an avid user. He is one of the few bosses to share his entire life there, from morning to night.
A good part of his publications are devoted to his flourishing businesses: Tesla, pioneer of the electric automobile, SpaceX with Martian sights, or Neuralink, specialized in biotechnologies. As Béatrice Mathieu, from L’Express, and Emmanuel Botta tell us in the excellent book-investigation Elon Musk to be published on May 17 by Robert Laffont, of which we publish exclusive passages here, Musk likes to flirt with the yellow line. A joke about a possible exit from the Tesla Stock Exchange, published in 2018 on Twitter, thus cost him… 20 million dollars in fines, imposed by the policeman of the financial markets, the SEC. But her thread is also populated by powerful domestic thoughts. “Sunday morning: to make or not to make cookies…”: 12,000 likes, all the same. Its community has 138 million subscribers, a world record. Five million more than Obama. More than Trump and Biden combined. An army of fans in whose eyes he often passes for a prophet, an inspiring hero. An Iron Man escaped from the comics.
“No diplomatic legitimacy”
To the photos of rockets and schoolboy jokes have been added in recent months more political messages. The tweet about Fauci is not an isolated case. One day, he relays a conspiracy theory about the husband of the leader of the democrats Nancy Pelosi, before deleting his publication. The other, he declares his love for the Republican candidate, the (very) conservative Ron DeSantis. In October, he also published a bewildering poll inviting Internet users to vote for or against a peace plan between kyiv and Moscow, taking up certain Putinist demands. Fury of the Ukrainians, amazement of the observers. “Elon Musk has no diplomatic legitimacy,” recalls Charleyne Biondi, digital policy advisor at the Institut Montaigne.
However, this exit is indicative of the influence he has gained in the geopolitical field. For a long time, its Starlink satellite connection only dreamed of geeks populating the many white areas of the United States. The war in Ukraine showed that this constellation was much more than a substitute product: a strategic tool for communicating in a war zone. As for the SpaceX launchers, they have enabled the Americans to no longer depend on the Russians for manned flights. The US Air Force sees further, which hopes one day, thanks to them, to move equipment and soldiers at high speed to all the hot spots of the globe.
Twitter, an eminently political network
Musk’s latest “toy” isn’t the least politically charged. “Twitter weighs only 5% of the activity of global social networks but it is particularly influential and connected to the news”, points out Bruno Breton, CEO of Bloom, who scrutinizes the global babble. It was in 2016, during the campaign opposing Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, that the blue bird made its nest in the debate of ideas. In June 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, 30% of exchanges on Twitter were about politics.
“It’s not just voters from the Trumpist and libertarian far right. Twitter was first, and still remains, an essential relay for the most left-wing ideas of the Democratic Party”, underlines Charleyne Biondi. Black Lives Matter, MeToo… It was on Twitter that these movements emerged, before being taken up by the traditional media. Today, “making an announcement by tweet rather than through the press has become common for public figures”, notes Alban Saint-Joigny, manager of Backbone Consulting, a consulting firm for executives. The tag (@) and hashtag (#) functions allow you to address each other directly and invite each other into all conversations.
Denounce the flaws of the system, to better fill them
The purchase of Twitter is undoubtedly a nice political move. Does Musk have secret ambitions in this area? It’s unlikely. Born in South Africa, he cannot claim the American presidency. His political line is, moreover, shifting. In April 2022, the entrepreneur published a diagram of his positioning, moving to the center left in 2008, at the start of the Obama era, then drifting to the center right, as the poles of right and left shifted. moved away, including since Trump’s election in 2016. After his recent support for Ron DeSantis, he immediately added that he was “open to the idea of revoting Democratic one day”. Understand who can…
More than the choice of a camp, it is his installation in California which first proved to be decisive in his career. “Intellectually, Musk owes a lot to Silicon Valley first of all”, underlines the sociologist Olivier Alexandre, research fellow at the CNRS and author of The Tech. When Silicon Valley remakes the world (Threshold). “He found himself in the right place, at the right time: in the mid-1990s at Stanford University, in the heart of this region, just before the democratization of the Internet. He earned his first fortune in software with this idea that this technology would be a revolution. He is therefore far from being the only one in this case.” This Californian gimmick – the star entrepreneur with big ambitions – then prevails over the rest.
His meeting with Peter Thiel, at the turn of the year 2000, completed his ideological construction. In addition to founding with him PayPal, which takes him to the upper echelons of this tech elite in full construction, Musk embraces with the latter the libertarian principles of the philosopher Ayn Rand. “A kind of right-wing anarchism, extreme social liberalism and economic opportunism”, deciphers Olivier Alexandre. This conception of the world is today pushed to the extreme with Twitter, where it defends an expression without limits (except for those who criticize it).
“What drives Elon Musk above all is to constantly point out the flaws in the system”, deciphers Asma Mhalla, teacher at Sciences Po and specialist in Big Tech. And, if possible, through its various businesses, to fill them. “It fills a generalized political vacuum on the question of the future. It gives a horizon, a purpose, an objective”, analyzes the expert, in particular on the question of the survival of humanity with SpaceX. On the fight against global warming with Tesla. And according to him, on the future of democracy, with Twitter. At the risk, however, of threatening its own business, in particular Tesla, by its divisive positions.
Risk to business
“The more Elon Musk becomes political on Twitter, the harder it will be for him to sell electric cars to a broad audience,” Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives wrote in a note in January. After the enthusiasm of the beginnings, the arrival of Musk at the head of the network has seriously cooled some of the advertisers and users. The latter are worried to see his maximalist vision of freedom of expression making the bed of hate speech, while 90% of the employees have been dismissed.
The new account certification system does nothing to reassure them: the identity of the tweeter is not checked, all you have to do is pay to benefit from the “Verified” badge. A boon for trolls and other propagators of intox, or simple strangers who can now dream of prescribers, thanks to the gain in visibility granted by the sticker. “Before Musk’s arrival, Twitter was the most advanced social network on collaboration with researchers, data sharing, in order to set up effective moderation devices, safeguard healthy discussion spaces… He broke everything “, regrets Nikos Smyrnaios, researcher in information and communication sciences at the University of Toulouse. At a time when the former founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is launching Bluesky, a new platform very inspired by the blue bird, Elon Musk’s success in social networks is therefore more uncertain. Winning hearts and souls is far more complex than sending humans to Mars.