It is hard to take anyone very seriously when they use the phrase “the woke mind virus” with a straight face. But, increasingly, when it comes to Elon Musk, there is no other option. Is he a visionary? A hypocrite? The last defender of the first amendment? Or simply a bullied kid who got his own back by buying the global playground and trashing it? Opinions of Musk are as volatile and wide-ranging as the man himself.
“When things are calm he seeks out storms,” says his biographer, Walter Isaacson. As this exhaustive documentary shows, when Musk acquired ownership and control of Twitter (subsequently rebranded X) in 2022, he certainly found one. The film works on several fascinating levels. It is a character study, a potted history of the last decade of American politics and also a detailed and disturbing exploration of how social media became a dysfunctional forum for the world’s grievances.
