Category Archives: Elon Musk

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro arrives to a resort hotel where he is expected to meet with Elon Musk in Porto Feliz, Brazil on Friday.Photo: Andre Penner (AP)

Theres a lot of scandals hitting Tesla CEO Elon Musk all at once, but at least he knows he has a friend in Brazils deforester-in-chief Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing demagogue who similarly to Musk, has a very hard time taking any sort of public criticism, and has tried using the power of his office to make sure his conspiracies dont get deplatformed.

Musks trip down south was reportedly meant to include talks about internet connectivity within the country alongside concerns of rapid deforestation. The Brazilian Amazon has seen a 15-year high under the three-year Brazilian president, which has scientists concerned it could lead to a total ecological collapse.

While making vague and unconvincing overtures to preserving the Amazon, Bolsonaro reportedly lauded the tech billionaire for his Twitter stance. The Brazilian president told the SpaceX CEO that his planned takeover of Twitter is a breath of hope, adding Freedom is the cement for the future. Musk has repeatedly said he doesnt agree with Twitter account perma-bans, and wants to effectively open up the platform for anybody and everybody to post what they want. The billionaire has proposed incredibly vague ideas for which tweets could require content moderation, including anything that is illegal or otherwise just destructive to the world, or just wrong or bad.

Bolsonaro, an ultra-right and violent figure who has defended the 20-year military dictatorship of his country that ended nearly 40 years ago, has claimed that companies like Twitter are left-wing and are silencing people like him. He has used those platforms to attack the Brazilian electoral system much in the same way former President Donald Trump did for the 2020 election. After Trump was banned, Bolsonaro told his supporters to avoid much of current social media.

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Musk is apparently seeking praise from wherever he can get it. He is currently embroiled in scandal after Insider reported Thursday about a SpaceX flight attendant who was allegedly sexually harassed by Musk, and that she was then paid $250,000 for her silence.

Alongside the sexual harassment accusation, Musk is being taken to task in a new FX and New York Times documentary that examines how the billionaire has responded to crashes involving his Tesla cars autopilot feature. Reporters say that Musk pressured lawmakers into curbing investigations into those crashes.

Other than for his Twitter stance, its no wonder that Bolsonaro is rolling out the red carpet for the worlds richest man. The president is five months out from a tense election this October, and Bloomberg reported Friday that Musk is a celebrity among Bolsonaros right-wing base. Musk himself proclaimed himself for the Republicans in a tweet Thursday afternoon.

Trying to get away from this accusation, Musk would apparently rather talk about his lingering plans for self-driving cars with the Brazilian strongman, despite the new documentary making the rounds. Of course, Musk has long promised completely autonomous vehicles, so its not like this is anything revelatory.

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Elon Musk Completes Transition to Supervillain With Bolsonaro Meeting in Brazil - Gizmodo

Why do billionaires tweet? Is it because they no longer have to earn a living? Or because theyre bored? Or because they spend a lot of time in, er, the smallest room in the mansion? Elon Musk, for example, currently the worlds richest fruitcake, has said that At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne, adding that it gives me solace. This revelation motivated the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to do some calculations, leading to the conclusion that more than 8,000 tweets over 12.5 years suggests that, on average, Musk poops twice a day. (I make it 1.75 a day, but thats just quibbling.)

So why does Musk tweet so much? One explanation is that he just cant help himself. He has, after all, revealed that he has Aspergers. Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, he said on Saturday Night Live, but thats just how my brain works. Understood. It may also be a partial explanation of his business success, because his mastery of SpaceX and Tesla suggests not only high intelligence but also an ability to focus intensely on exceedingly complex problems without being distracted by other considerations.

There are, however, darker interpretations shared, it seems by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that some of his tweeting is not, as it were, involuntary but is aimed at manipulating stock markets. Exhibit A: his announcement on 4 April that he had acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter sent its shares rocketing upwards from $39.31 to $49.97 which meant the value of his holding went from $2.9bn to $3.5bn, giving him a notional profit of $600m in a single day. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

Exhibit B: on 26 April he agrees to buy the company, whose shares were trading at $49.68 that day, for $54.20 a share, which leads Wall Street to conclude that he was paying too much. Then (exhibit C), on 13 May he announces that he is pausing his bid pending investigation of Twitters estimate of the prevalence of spam bots on the platform and the share price tumbles, confirming Wall Streets view of its overvaluation, but also suggesting that Musk is trying to find a way of wriggling out of what is now beginning to look like a foolish deal. And if that proves impossible for legal reasons, stand by for a torrent of tweets portraying himself as a victim.

Where the truth lies in all this is unknowable, at least to a humble columnist, but the thing to keep hold of is that its all been driven by Musks tweets. Theres method somewhere in the madness, in other words.

On one thing we can all agree, though, is that Musk is sui generis. What then about another insanely rich guy also obsessed with space exploration Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder? He bought the venerable Washington Post newspaper in August 2013 for what was effectively small change $250m. This had the useful side-effect of infuriating Donald Trump. More importantly, it secured the papers future. And, as far as we can tell, Bezos doesnt seem to be driving the Posts editorial agenda.

Yet Bezos, too, seems to have a tweeting problem. Last week, for example, Joe Biden published an anodyne tweet saying You want to bring down inflation? Lets make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share. Up pops Bezos, saying the newly created Disinformation [Governance] Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead. Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection. He followed this with what can only be described as a sermonette in Twitter-speak: In fact, the administration tried hard to inject even more stimulus into an already over-heated, inflationary economy and only Manchin [Joe, the coal-brokerage founder who is also a senator representing West Virginia] saved them from themselves. Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent. Misdirection doesnt help the country.

So why is Bezos wasting his time on Twitter? I can only think of two reasons: one bad and one good. The bad one is that hes bored not running Amazon any more and needs to do some virtue-signalling just to show Musk (and the Twitterverse) that other billionaires are available. Though, as Politicos Jack Shafer puts it: Twitter fulminations may give Bezos a rush of ego-gratification, but why should the man who owns an entire dairy get such a kick out of sipping from a personal-sized milk carton?

The more charitable interpretation is that, unlike most proprietors of newspapers, hes not using the Post as his personal megaphone and using Twitter to indulge his inner child. Like Musk but without the porcelain, in other words. So at least any war between the two of them wont be a game of thrones.

A strange breedLife among the Econ. Axel Leijonhufvuds delightful satirical ethnography, now available as a pdf, of an interesting academic tribe economists.

Hidden figuresA nice essay in the online magazine Aeon by Ann-Sophie Barwich on how the history of ideas still struggles to remember the names of notable female philosophers.

Culture clashFighting talk from Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column about US supreme court justice Samuel Alitos views on womens rights.

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What do Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have in common? An unhealthy Twitter habit - The Guardian

Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Tesla's "Gigafactory" in Germany. Patrick PleulAFP via Getty Images hide caption

Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Tesla's "Gigafactory" in Germany.

Just as his effort to buy Twitter has led the world to focus on Elon Musk's management style and business strategies, FX and The New York Times have stepped up with a documentary taking a close look at how Musk responded to crashes involving the Autopilot function in cars from his company, Tesla.

For those watching Musk's fitful attempt to buy Twitter, the film also serves as a pointed comparison; showing how his penchant for bold moves and provocative statements can lead fans to see what they want in his words regardless of whether what he says is actually possible.

As part of FX's The New York Times Presents documentary series, Elon Musk's Crash Course suggests that Musk oversold the cars' self-driving capabilities, leading to public confusion over what it could actually do. And when federal authorities began an investigation into a fatal crash involving the technology, the program says Musk pressured officials to curb the investigation.

"He would say really cool things like science fiction things and he would make you believe that you could do it," said JT Stukes, a former senior product engineer at Tesla, noting how Musk's ambitious public statements turned into goals staffers would have to work hard to attain.

"The message is constantly going up and down," added Cade Metz, a technology correspondent for the New York Times. "Elon can change his mind at any moment. He can say one thing at one moment and then say something completely different."

The film features fresh interviews with a wide range of subjects, including former Tesla employees and corporate leaders, Times journalists and friends of a man killed in a 2016 crash while operating his Tesla's Autopilot function. Musk declined to sit for an interview, but is represented by loads of clips from public appearances and past interviews.

In one clip, Musk is shown calling the development of self-driving technology for cars a "solved problem"; in others, he predicts a near future where cars can park themselves and navigate long trips without driver assistance.

Times journalists and some critics say such bullish talk has confused consumers, leading them to think that Tesla's cars can be trusted to drive themselves. The film notes that Tesla used hype around its Autopilot system as a selling point to get consumers to buy its cars.

But Tesla insists drivers should keep hands on the steering wheel while Autopilot is operating, just in case the system fails to recognize a road hazard. (In one telling news clip, a CNN anchor asks: if drivers still must hold the steering wheel while Autopilot is on, "what's the point?")

Crashes involving Tesla's Autopilot function explicitly illustrate the high stakes involved. One man, Josh Brown, was killed when his car didn't recognize a tractor trailer crossing in front of the vehicle.

"People were trusting the system to do things it was not designed or capable of doing," Stukes said. "The fact that...[Brown's accident] happened was obviously tragic...But it was going to happen."

One former employee noted Musk had updates to the autopilot sent to his personal vehicles, so staffers wound up working to address his concerns instead of looking at larger issues. Another ex-employee said cameras the cars use to detect traffic and roadways had a blind spot where a small dog or small child might not be seen.

When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finally released its report on the accident which claimed Brown's life, it concluded the Autopilot system wasn't at fault, because it was an Advanced Driver Assistance System requiring the driver to pay attention during operation. The report also included an observation which the film says was based on data from Tesla that the company's cars with the auto-steering technology crashed 40% less than those without it, allowing Tesla to spin the report as a positive finding.

The film quoted one former employee, software engineer Raven Jiang, who was unsettled by how the system worked. "Sometimes it seems like people and companies were being rewarded, not for telling the truth, but in fact, for doing a bit of the opposite," he added.

Like a few other TV projects these days, the documentary zeroes in on the strategy employed by many Silicon Valley leaders to talk up the possibilities of their companies' products before their achievements are fully realized. It's a "fake it until you make it" style that allows companies to harness enthusiasm and capital to push toward goals which might otherwise seem impossible to reach.

But Elon Musk's Crash Course is a straightforward look at the dangers of such an approach when the product involved controls a speeding automobile.

And it asks us all the consider the possible damage from a system which tolerates and even rewards such risks in service of a powerful, wealthy business moguls chasing profits and glory.

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'Elon Musk's Crash Course' shows the tragic cost of his leadership - NPR

Twitter reports that fewer than 5% of accounts are fakes or spammers, commonly referred to as bots. Since his offer to buy Twitter was accepted, Elon Musk has repeatedly questioned these estimates, even dismissing Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawals public response.

Later, Musk put the deal on hold and demanded more proof.

So why are people arguing about the percentage of bot accounts on Twitter?

As the creators of Botometer, a widely used bot detection tool, our group at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media has been studying inauthentic accounts and manipulation on social media for over a decade. We brought the concept of the social bot to the foreground and first estimated their prevalence on Twitter in 2017.

Based on our knowledge and experience, we believe that estimating the percentage of bots on Twitter has become a very difficult task, and debating the accuracy of the estimate might be missing the point. Here is why.

To measure the prevalence of problematic accounts on Twitter, a clear definition of the targets is necessary. Common terms such as fake accounts, spam accounts and bots are used interchangeably, but they have different meanings. Fake or false accounts are those that impersonate people. Accounts that mass-produce unsolicited promotional content are defined as spammers. Bots, on the other hand, are accounts controlled in part by software; they may post content or carry out simple interactions, like retweeting, automatically.

These types of accounts often overlap. For instance, you can create a bot that impersonates a human to post spam automatically. Such an account is simultaneously a bot, a spammer and a fake. But not every fake account is a bot or a spammer, and vice versa. Coming up with an estimate without a clear definition only yields misleading results.

Defining and distinguishing account types can also inform proper interventions. Fake and spam accounts degrade the online environment and violate platform policy. Malicious bots are used to spread misinformation, inflate popularity, exacerbate conflict through negative and inflammatory content, manipulate opinions, influence elections, conduct financial fraud and disrupt communication. However, some bots can be harmless or even useful, for example by helping disseminate news, delivering disaster alerts and conducting research.

Simply banning all bots is not in the best interest of social media users.

For simplicity, researchers use the term inauthentic accounts to refer to the collection of fake accounts, spammers and malicious bots. This is also the definition Twitter appears to be using. However, it is unclear what Musk has in mind.

Even when a consensus is reached on a definition, there are still technical challenges to estimating prevalence.

Networks of coordinated accounts spreading COVID-19 information from low-credibility sources on Twitter in 2020. Pik-Mai Hui

External researchers do not have access to the same data as Twitter, such as IP addresses and phone numbers. This hinders the publics ability to identify inauthentic accounts. But even Twitter acknowledges that the actual number of inauthentic accounts could be higher than it has estimated, because detection is challenging.

Inauthentic accounts evolve and develop new tactics to evade detection. For example, some fake accounts use AI-generated faces as their profiles. These faces can be indistinguishable from real ones, even to humans. Identifying such accounts is hard and requires new technologies.

Another difficulty is posed by coordinated accounts that appear to be normal individually but act so similarly to each other that they are almost certainly controlled by a single entity. Yet they are like needles in the haystack of hundreds of millions of daily tweets.

Finally, inauthentic accounts can evade detection by techniques like swapping handles or automatically posting and deleting large volumes of content.

The distinction between inauthentic and genuine accounts gets more and more blurry. Accounts can be hacked, bought or rented, and some users donate their credentials to organizations who post on their behalf. As a result, so-called cyborg accounts are controlled by both algorithms and humans. Similarly, spammers sometimes post legitimate content to obscure their activity.

We have observed a broad spectrum of behaviors mixing the characteristics of bots and people. Estimating the prevalence of inauthentic accounts requires applying a simplistic binary classification: authentic or inauthentic account. No matter where the line is drawn, mistakes are inevitable.

The focus of the recent debate on estimating the number of Twitter bots oversimplifies the issue and misses the point of quantifying the harm of online abuse and manipulation by inauthentic accounts.

Recent evidence suggests that inauthentic accounts might not be the only culprits responsible for the spread of misinformation, hate speech, polarization and radicalization. These issues typically involve many human users. For instance, our analysis shows that misinformation about COVID-19 was disseminated overtly on both Twitter and Facebook by verified, high-profile accounts.Through BotAmp, a new tool from the Botometer family that anyone with a Twitter account can use, we have found that the presence of automated activity is not evenly distributed. For instance, the discussion about cryptocurrencies tends to show more bot activity than the discussion about cats. Therefore, whether the overall prevalence is 5% or 20% makes little difference to individual users; their experiences with these accounts depend on whom they follow and the topics they care about.

Even if it were possible to precisely estimate the prevalence of inauthentic accounts, this would do little to solve these problems. A meaningful first step would be to acknowledge the complex nature of these issues. This will help social media platforms and policymakers develop meaningful responses.

Article by Kai-Cheng Yang, Doctoral Student in Informatics, Indiana University and Filippo Menczer, Professor of Informatics and Computer Science, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Elon Musks obsession with bots will do nothing to stop Twitter spam - The Next Web

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has said that his electric vehicle company Tesla will have self-driving cars without the need for human drivers, behind the wheel for supervision, around this time next year.

According to the auto-tech website Electrek, it is not the first time that Musk made this announcement.

He made the announcement in Brazil, where he was for a partnership with the local government to launch a program to connect Amazonian regions with SpaceX's Starlink satellite-based internet.

Recently, Electrek reported that Musk changed Tesla's 1 million robotaxis by end of the year goal to a1 million people in Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta, which are two different things.

The term "robotaxi" implies that a vehicle can provide a taxi service without a driver at the wheel.

On the other hand, Tesla's FSD Beta has all the features of a self-driving system, but they often fail, which is why it requires a driver behind the wheel at all-time to be attentive and ready to take control.

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Tesla to soon have self-driving cars without need for human drivers: Elon Musk - Economic Times

The tech elite, however, had it all. Facebooks Sheryl Sandberg was, for a while, a feminist icon. Musk has millions of Twitter followers, many of them actual human beings rather than bots, and these followers have often been ardent Tesla defenders.

Now the glitter is gone. Social media, once hailed as a force for freedom, are now denounced as vectors of misinformation. Tesla boosterism has been dented by tales of spontaneous combustion and autopilot accidents. Technology moguls still possess vast wealth, but the public and the administration isnt offering the old level of adulation.

And its driving them crazy.

Weve seen this movie before. Back in 2010 much of the Wall Street elite, rather than feeling grateful for having been bailed out, was consumed with Obama rage. Financial wheeler-dealers were furious at not, in their view, receiving the respect they deserved after, um, crashing the world economy.

Unfortunately, plutocratic pettiness matters. Money cant buy admiration, but it can buy political power; its disheartening that some of this power will be deployed on behalf of a Republican Party that is descending ever deeper into authoritarianism.

Did I mention that the most recent meeting of the right-wing gathering CPAC, which included a video address from Donald Trump, was held in Hungary under the auspices of Viktor Orban, who has effectively killed his nations democracy?

The right turn by some technology billionaires is also, may I say, very stupid.

Its true that oligarchs can get very rich under autocrats like Orban or Vladimir Putin, whom much of the U.S. right deeply admired until he began losing his war in Ukraine.

But these days Russias oligarchs are, by many accounts, terrified. For even vast wealth offers little security against the erratic behavior and vindictiveness of leaders unconstrained by the rule of law.

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Opinion | Musk and Bezo Show the Perils of Plutocratic Pettiness - The New York Times

Kimbal Musk and Mr. Gracias, who left Teslas board last year and serves as a SpaceX director, declined to comment for this article.

Today, Mr. Musk oversees or is associated with at least a dozen companies, including public ones, private ones and holding companies such as Wyoming Steel, which he uses to manage real estate. His net worth stands at about $250 billion.

As Mr. Musk established more companies, he collected associates he could deploy across many of the endeavors.

One was Mary Beth Brown, who was hired in 2002 to essentially be Mr. Musks executive assistant. Known as M.B., she soon became a kind of chief of staff, handling media requests and some financial matters for SpaceX and Tesla, as well as helping to manage Mr. Musks personal life, said Ashlee Vance, the author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

That same year, Mr. Musk hired Gwynne Shotwell as SpaceXs seventh employee. As the rocket makers president and chief operating officer, Ms. Shotwell has overseen the companys growth, becoming one of Mr. Musks longest-lasting employees.

At a conference in 2018, Ms. Shotwell explained how she managed Mr. Musk.

When Elon says something, you have to pause and not immediately blurt out, Well, thats impossible, or, Theres no way were going to do that. I dont know how, she said. So you zip it, and you think about it. And you find ways to get that done.

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How Elon Musk Winged It With Twitter, and Everything Else - The New York Times

Elon Musk gave a glimpse of his plans for Twitter while walking the red carpet at the Met Gala in New York City on Monday night revealing his ambition for the divisive social-media platform to be as inclusive as possible.

Right now, its sort of niche. I want a much bigger percentage of the country to be on it, engaging in dialogue, a tuxedo-clad Musk told reporters at the event, according to Reuters.

In an interview with Vogue, Musk added that he wanted to make Twitter as inclusive as possible and to have as broad a swath of the country and the rest of the world on Twitter and that they find it interesting and entertaining and funny and it makes their life better.

Meanwhile, Musk downplayed concerns about an employee exodus on the red carpet, telling reporting its a free country and they were free to seek other opportunities as they wished.

Certainly if anyone doesnt feel comfortable with that, they will on their own accord go somewhere else. Thats fine, Musk said.

Musk attended the swanky event alongside his mother, model Maye Musk, in what was one of his first public appearances since Twitters board accepted his offer to buy the company for $44 billion.

The tech entrepreneurs deal to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share is expected to close later this year. Both sides have agreed to a $1 billion breakup fee under certain conditions if the deal falls apart.

Musks remarks at the Met Gala echoed previous statements about his plan to make Twitter maximum fun for its user base. The billionaire is known for making irreverent use of his own account, posting memes and cartoons as often as he does serious information about his business dealings.

But Musks brash commentary on the platform has also upset many Twitter employees and critics who say his willingness to publicly criticize others and plan to dial down the companys content moderation policy will lead to more abusive content.

Last week, Musk drew scrutiny after he tweeted criticism of current Twitter executives, including the social media firms top legal office and chief censor. Employees have also expressed concern about the possibility that Musk will look to slash jobs once his takeover is complete.

A tired looking Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal acknowledged likely changes to the company culture during an all-hands meeting last week and admitted that he has some regrets about how the process has unfolded.

There are things I disagree with fundamentally, Agrawal said, without providing specifics.

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Elon Musk talks Twitter at Met Gala, wants it to be 'as inclusive as possible' - New York Post

ElonMuskmay be behind a nearly $1 million payment to helpAmber Heardcomplete a hefty pledge following her divorce fromJohnny Depp.

As detailed in Depp and Heards ongoing Virginia libel case, the Aquaman star said in August 2016 that she would donate her $7 million divorce settlement to charity by splitting it evenly between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

But Depps attorneys have been trying to show that Heard has not followed through on her vow.

A video deposition from the ACLUs general counsel, Terence Dougherty, was played in court late last week, in which he said that the organization has so far received $1.3 million from the actress.

However, most of it did not even come directly from Heard. The court heard that the Drive Angry star, 36, paid $100,000 in August 2016, and then Depp, 58, made another payment of $100,000 in his ex-wifes name later that same month.

It is believed that a foundation said to be controlled byMusk a Vanguard donor-advised fund (DAF) anonymously donated $500,000 to the ACLU in Heards name in June 2107.

Then, in December 2018, a Fidelity DAF anonymously contributed $350,000 on the Pineapple Express stars behalf.

The last donation is not confirmed to be fromMusk the worlds richest man, who recently bought Twitter for $44 billion but he is the only known person to have anonymously donated on Heards behalf.

Musk, 50,has become a huge point of contention amid the exes legal battle, as Depp previously accused Heard of cheating on him with the tech mogul during their marriage.

Page Six exclusively revealed in the summer of 2016 that Heard and Musk were spotted spending time together at the Delano hotel in Miami.

Theydated until August 2017, and he later told Rolling Stone, I was really in love, and it hurt bad. Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, adding he was in severe emotional pain following the split.

Heard and Musk reconciled their relationship early the following year but broke up again a few months later.

Reps for Depp didnt comment, and spokespeople for Heard andMuskdidnt get back to us.

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Elon Musk may be behind nearly $1M in donations in Amber Heard's name - Page Six

Im going to attempt the impossible and use his name only once in this piece, but as you may have heard, Elon Musk is in the process of buying Twitter. Musk is (fuck, sorry), among other things, not a very good person, and I dont look forward to his reign at the website where I spend a significant amount of time any more than you do. But first I need the people who make up Twitters loudest contingent to admit something: that they do not hate Twitter, it is not a hell site or a garbage fire, and that, in fact, they want to kiss Twitter on the mouth.

Right now, a lot of important people are talking about how much Twitter sucks, how it has always sucked, and how it will suck even worse when its new owner succeeds at doing whatever he wants with it, which as we all know is going to be cloaked in some kind of moral crusade for free speech and will end up incentivizing the worst people in the world to be even more brazenly terrible. As Katie Notopoulos points out in her correct piece on why Twitter users actually deserve an evil overlord, there are good reasons to hate the platform: coordinated harassment campaigns, trolls, bots, doxxing, threats, the official Dennys brand account, and perhaps worst of all, people who use a random tweet as a springboard to talk about their unrelated personal grievances.

Set all of those things aside for a moment, though, and think about who Twitter is really for, who spends the most time there, and what its main purpose is. Twitter is a platform of words, meaning that one of its most vocal demographics is writers. And writers are annoying.

It is extremely funny, for instance, that on basically every other social media platform, the most ardent users proudly call themselves creators, a term that evokes art and inventiveness and excitement. Some of them are even able to make money there, like real, life-altering money!

Writers, on the other hand, aside from not making money on Twitter, are also for the most part deeply ashamed of their use of it, referring to the platform regularly in exactly the same tone I am doing now, as a smelly, fetid swamp full of decomposing yet self-righteous bog people. Sure, some people are making money on Twitter, via tips or Super Follows or the many sex workers who have built livings off of its comparatively lax content restrictions. But the real capital is found in the zillions of mostly meaningless interactions on Twitter, which carry oversized weight in the minds of people involved in them. Which, of course, makes them even more fun to pay attention to.

Why else would the media be so obsessed with talking about and spending time on a platform that by most accounts is irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans? Its because the media is full of writers, all of whom are obsessed with how they stack up against their friends and nemeses, and Twitter is the easiest way to keep score. Writers often joke that they hope to one day be so successful as to never have to log onto Twitter again, and some lucky few have certainly achieved that dream. They say theyre only there out of obligation or the sense that theyll become irrelevant should they ever log off. But you can be at the top of your field, regarded as an expert, a visionary, a Correct Opinion Haver, making hundreds of thousands, if not millions if not billions! of dollars, and you still will be poisoned by the part of the human condition that craves tiny spurts of attention and immediate rewards for the least possible effort. You can pontificate that Twitter is rotting our brains and you might be correct, but when has the knowledge that something is bad for us ever prevented human beings from doing it anyway?

There is something sanctimonious and condescending about a big writer guy tweeting about how bad the platform is when they have gained so much influence and power from using it; it is not dissimilar from the rash of regreditorials from men who got really, really rich building tech companies and then realized that Facebook and Google are actually pretty bad for everyone but themselves.

Here is where I will bravely admit that I sometimes enjoy being on Twitter. Ive made actual friends there, and I owe probably a decent chunk of my career to having a little bit of a Twitter following. Its not always good; I dont love the anxious feeling I get when Im scrolling simply because it is something to do that is not the thing I should be doing, but that is less Twitters fault than my own inability to manage my time. I dont like when people are being mean or scoldy in a way that goes beyond merely annoying and into these feelings should maybe be dealt with in private. And I dont like that Twitter makes people feel as though if theyre not saying the loudest, most extreme version of the thing they are trying to say, then theyre not saying anything at all.

Maybe youre not on Twitter and this sounds incredibly dramatic. Even so, if you have used the internet at all you have participated in and benefited from the platforms influence, either the actually important parts (many a grassroots social movement, for one) or the still-pretty-important parts (iconic shitposts, inventive joke formats). Without Twitter, we wouldnt have Black Twitter or Weird Twitter or all the other forms of delightful internet-born humor that have made their way into mainstream culture. Like all social platforms, Twitter is a double-edged sword: By shoving millions of people into a single virtual room, the mechanisms by which progressive change can flourish work just as well for the movements opposing it. I will spare you the lecture on echo chambers and extremist rabbit holes because Id argue that what these common critiques often miss is that the problem of Twitter is less that its an ad-supported, algorithmic feed and more that its simply too big for any one company to manage. The same is even more true for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Google, Apple, and most of the platforms that are now so integral to American life that losing or breaking up one of them is almost unfathomable.

Perhaps its new leader will make the site so unpleasant as to be unusable for normal people. That would be a really, really weird thing to witness. Consider the lost clout! Consider the meltdowns! But I think it would take a great deal of mismanagement for that to happen. After all, how could anyone think that creating a message board made up of more than 200 million writers too ugly to be of much interest on Instagram or too sexy for its puritanical content restrictions would yield results that were anything less than what Twitter is: chaotic, fun, evil, disgusting, delightfully sinister, a billion other things. How could it have been any different? And how could we ever look away?

This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you dont miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

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Just admit that you love Twitter even if Elon Musk is buying it - Vox.com