Dissecting Elon Musk’s Tweets: Memes, Rants, Personal Elements and Echo Chamber

The day after Thanksgiving, almost one month after Elon Musk turned the proprietor of Twitter, he returned to one among his interest horses. “I’m simply preventing at no cost speech in America,” he wrote in a tweet.

One in all 28 that he posted that day — starting simply after midnight, following messages about how tasty his vacation meal was — the free speech tweet was in response to 2 followers who had been aggrieved about how Mr. Musk was being handled since buying the social community in late October. The submit was appreciated greater than 46,000 occasions.

Mr. Musk has usually stated that Twitter must be extra open and crammed with a better range of voices and factors of view. However Mr. Musk’s Twitter feed is commonly an echo chamber. He frequently sees, likes and replies to messages which can be about him or are posted from accounts that usually act as his cheerleaders, in accordance with a New York Instances overview of his exercise on the platform.

To be able to assess how the social community might evolve beneath Mr. Musk’s watch, The Instances reviewed almost 20,000 of his tweets, analyzing posts from latest years and pictures he revealed over the previous decade, in addition to the comparatively small variety of customers that he follows.

What Mr. Musk says on Twitter has an enormous attain, now greater than ever: His viewers is likely one of the largest, with almost 128 million accounts following him. It’s the place he solicits recommendation, conducts polls, condemns censorship and publicizes sweeping coverage adjustments on the platform. As an influence person who now controls the corporate — he lately known as himself the “chief twit” — Mr. Musk has vowed to remake the social community in his imaginative and prescient.

Of the 178 accounts that Mr. Musk adopted as of Tuesday, most had been associated to his companies, or have expressed admiration of his enterprise model, the Instances overview discovered. The checklist is closely male: Solely two dozen that aren’t institutional or organizational accounts belong to ladies. He’s associated to 2 of them — his mom, Maye, and sister, Tosca — and was married to a 3rd.

Amid discussions of Twitter insurance policies, web satellites from SpaceX and Tesla software program updates, his posts have a freewheeling high quality to them. He traffics in juvenile humor and vulgar jokes (photos of tape dispensers laid in sexual positions), scientific marvels (the Massive Hadron Collider), in style topics on far-right websites (Pepe the Frog) and critiques of divisive cultural points (“I’m not brainwashed!!”).

Mr. Musk’s posting model is conversational, and frequently satirical. He messages with former Democratic cupboard officers, criticizes information organizations and trades barbs with enterprise capitalists.

“The buying of Twitter was an influence transfer, politically,” stated Joan Donovan, the analysis director of the Shorenstein Heart on Media, Politics and Public Coverage at Harvard. “He is likely one of the richest man on this planet shopping for a social media firm in a transfer that’s expressly about politics and affect on tradition and on media.”

Usually, his updates are restricted to only memes — joking pictures or movies which can be copied and extensively shared. Many have origins on fringe websites or cryptocurrency message boards which can be in style together with his followers. Some are about him. Some seem like unique.

Mr. Musk didn’t reply to a request for remark about his exercise. At Twitter, as with lots of his different firms, Mr. Musk has no conventional press group. As an alternative, he tweets.

Since he created his account in June 2009, Mr. Musk has posted greater than 21,000 occasions. In recent times, that has meant posting all hours of the day, most days of the week.

Mr. Musk has “made himself unignorable by changing into king of Twitter,” Ms. Donovan added.

Over a 48-hour interval in November, a second when he touted report exercise on the social community beneath his management, Mr. Musk posted 60 occasions. His posts included commentary on the collapse of a cryptocurrency and combative responses to critiques about his office insurance policies. In a single occasion, he issued a decree about parody accounts after customers modified their profile names to mimic him.

Lots of his missives rapidly turned in style amongst his followers.

It’s unclear precisely what Mr. Musk sees in his feed. The precise sequence relies on whether or not he has chosen to obtain algorithmic suggestions or simply tweets from accounts he follows. (He has beforehand tweeted that individuals are being “manipulated by the algorithm.”)

His exercise more and more consists of replying to customers who’ve talked about him. When he responds to accounts that he doesn’t comply with, he often chooses those who have complimented or praised him: In dozens of situations over the previous six months, in accordance with the Instances evaluation, he has replied to tweets from customers whose account descriptions point out that they assist or put money into firms owned by Mr. Musk, or that they’re followers of his management.

There are occasions when he second guesses what he broadcasts.

Over the previous two years, he has deleted a whole bunch of tweets inside hours of posting them. In accordance with the PolitiTweet web site, which archives all of Mr. Musk’s tweets, he has additionally deleted dozens of tweets within the months since he acquired Twitter.

On Nov. 14, for instance, Mr. Musk tweeted that he could be “working and sleeping” at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco till the positioning was fastened.

An internet site monitoring Mr. Musk’s personal jet motion instructed that he traveled away from San Francisco round that point. He deleted the tweet 18 hours after first posting it.

However for an individual with as giant a follower base as Mr. Musk has, deleting tweets might do little to alter how extensively seen or influential these posts turn out to be when they’re first revealed.

“Hundreds of thousands of individuals see his tweets, not many will discover when they’re deleted,” Ms. Donovan stated.

Many tweets which have landed Mr. Musk in scorching water stay on-line.

In 2018, just a few weeks after Mr. Musk had smoked marijuana throughout an on-camera interview for Joe Rogan’s podcast, Mr. Musk tweeted that he had the funding to take Tesla personal at $420 a share.

Specialists started to query whether or not his whole feed was being produced in jest, and identified the repeated marijuana references in his tweets (together with his proposed funding value).

That incident led to prices from the Securities and Alternate Fee, and later a settlement that included monitoring of what Mr. Musk might submit about Tesla on Twitter. Shareholders at the moment are additionally in search of billions of {dollars} in damages in a lawsuit after Mr. Musk’s takeover proposal by no means materialized.

Final week, Mr. Musk joined an investor name as Tesla reported its latest quarterly earnings, which confirmed a good leap in earnings regardless of a rising checklist of issues plaguing the corporate. The automaker’s blended efficiency final yr had led many to query whether or not Mr. Musk’s focus and a spotlight on Twitter had meant that he was neglecting his duties at Tesla.

Mr. Musk deflected that criticism on the earnings name, suggesting that his thousands and thousands of Twitter followers had been an indication of his recognition.

“I may not be in style with some folks,” he stated, “however for the overwhelming majority of individuals, my follower depend speaks for itself.”