Twitter has been taken over by its least interesting troll for $44bn. When Elon Musk took a stake in the platform, he claimed it was to ensure the “future of civilisation” and preserve a “common digital town square”. Roughly translated, that means the world’s richest man has bought his favourite megaphone.
Musk, with 112.1 million followers, is an obsessive Twitter tryhard: the attention economy’s biggest attention-seeker. From baselessly calling a British diver a “pedo”, to his baffling stunt at Twitter HQ – turning up with a kitchen sink and uttering the punchline, “let that sink in” – he clearly thinks comedy is his metier. He reminds me of Christopher Hitchens’ barb about an enemy: he “thinks he’s a wit and is half right”.
