Remember when Jeb Bush ran for president? (No one will judge you harshly if you dont.) The son of a former president, the brother of another, and a successful two-term governorJeb was the GOP moneys first choice in 2016. He might not have been the presumptive nominee, but at the start, it was his race to lose.

Then, as the New Hampshire primary approachedand a deranged political novice named Donald Trump was poised to trounce both him and the rest of the fieldlow energy Jeb went viral for sheepishly asking a town hall crowd to please clap for the speech they didnt realize he had just finished.

No one could accuse Elon Musk of being low energy, but over the past few weeks, the Tesla and X boss has channeled Jebs desperate need for validationas the house burned down around him.

Musk recently posted, Please forward links to X posts to your friends so they know whats actually happening Some people still believe the legacy media!

This plea to users to tell their friends where the REAL news could be found came a day after NBC News cited data that showed X had lost about 23 percent of its daily active users in the U.S. since Musk bought Twitter in Oct. 2022and later rebranded it X. (Worldwide, the sites lost 15 percent of active daily users.)

The report also said Musk had managed to chase away 75 of the top 100 advertisers in the U.S. He put a punctuation mark on this dubious achievement in Nov. 2023after endorsing a tweet pushing a notorious antisemitic conspiracy theory as the actual truthby telling fleeing companies to go fuck themselves.

The anti-woke podcaster Konstantin Kisin tweeted the day after Hamas Oct. 7 massacres in Israel that Yesterday demonstrated why turning Twitter into X has changed everything If you dont believe me, look at how the media covered yesterday The worldview shared by most elites no longer has a monopoly over what we see with our own eyes. That alone is worth $44 billion. (Like a master petting his dog on the head, Musk replied, Good thread.)

Among Musk sycophants, this is an article of faith. The media only lies to you, and Elon Musks barely moderated social-media site has liberated the unvarnished truth for the masses.

But, as anyone with even a passing interest in verifying facts can tell you, Musks X is worthless in a breaking news situation. Anonymous, fake, malicious accounts now have the coveted blue check of verification, and their posts are prioritized all over their site.

During every major breaking news event since Musk sold verification for $8/month (or just gave the blue checks away for free to political commentators he likes), X is a fetid swamp of misinformation. To cite a recent example, the Baltimore bridge tragedy added copious amounts of unbridled racism to the flood of fake news, as well.

And as someone who works in the opinion journalism field, Ive found Musks X to be almost as inessential when it comes to keeping my pulse on the discourse. Whereas Twitterfor all its many faultswas once a place where you could see serious arguments and narrative-shaping happening in real time, the infinite scroll of Xs $8 blue checks in the replies makes it all but impossible to know how widely shared tweets are being received by anyone not in Musks ideological tribe.

For all of Musks populist talk about making the site a more egalitarian place of robust disagreement, free of ideological gatekeepers, the new X is a cloistered feedback bubble of MAGA, Intellectual Dark Web, and racist edgelords.

Its worth noting, but is far too voluminous to document in one column, that Musk regularly spreads false conspiracy theories and fake news sites, including a recent propaganda video pushing the Great Replacement Theory and alleging that Democrats nationwide are in on the plan. (Anti-woke billionaire investor Bill Ackman further boosted the video, declaring it credible.)

...hes still puffing his chest out with the bravado of an anti-woke, Western civilization-saving, alpha male. But scratch his tender shell and youll find a scared, overcompensating man whos probably smart enough to know its over.

During the chaotic months in 2022 when Musk tried to buy Twitter, then tried to get out of the deal, before ultimately coughing up $44 billion, Musk fan Bari Weiss said of the controversy regarding the imminent management change: He wants free speech. Those who hate him don't.

So hows that going? Business might be cratering and the sites completely lost its cachet as a news hub, but surely Musk made X the haven for free speech that he promised, right?

Only if you ignore his arbitrary suspensions of journalists he doesnt like, his delegation of words like cisgender as hate speech, his deplatforming and shadow-banning of links to competitors like Substack, his compliance with foreign governments to do their censorship bidding, his speech-chilling threats to sue organizations that observed how much more bigoted content is on the site since he bought it, and his completely bogus (and recently dismissed) suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

In tossing that case, Judge Charles Bryer said: Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiffs true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech. (Matt Taibbi, one of his hand-picked Twitter Files stenographers, has even publicly lamented that Musk has failed to live up to his free speech warrior hype.)

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

He may readily dole out grandiose, alpha male bravado about saving Western civilization and fearlessly defending free speechbut methinks Musk doth overcompensate too much.

Scratch his tender shell and youll find a scared, flailing man whos probably smart enough to know its over.

As far as his X-periment goes, this is Elon Musks Please Clap era.

Excerpt from:

Elon Musk Has Entered the 'Please Clap' Stage of His Megalomania - The Daily Beast