Elon Musk: three tweets a day against the media
The world's richest man promotes the slogan "The medium is you" through the X network, which he manages in an opaque and vertical manner.
BarcelonaElon Musk is a man of many hats. He not only guides the destiny of the car company Tesla, the aerospace company SpaceX, the artificial intelligence firm xAI, and the brain implant company Neuralink, but he is also the owner of the social network X, its most followed user, and, as a bonus, one of its most active. Of all his feverish activity, one obsession stands out: trying to denigrate traditional media. A Reporters Without Borders study focused on the last year has calculated that in these twelve months he has published up to 1,017 messages against the media. That is, an average of three per day.
His most repeated mantra is "The medium is you." It is a slogan that appeals to the old democratizing dream of the internet, but one that is increasingly being questioned, even by the very promoters of the World Wide Web, as they observe that the digital space is increasingly controlled by a small number of people. In Musk's case, the evolution is especially evident: Twitter was born as a network where, by the wishes of its founder, Jack Dorsey, users had the power to make their voices heard. This helped, given that the executive had been critical on several occasions of a private company having the power to decide what could and could not be said in the digital agora. But the purchase of the current company by the world's richest man thwarted that horizontal vision. Despite his liberal rhetoric, Musk has actually proven to be much more interventionist. It was Musk who decided, for example, to reinstate Donald Trump's account. And it is he who has left the so-called "community notes"—comments that can be embedded in a message and labeled as true or false—in the hands of the most radicalized digital mob. On one occasion, Musk even asked the engineers to modify the algorithm to ensure that one of his tweets would have more impact than a similar one from then-President Joe Biden.
Vincent Berthier, RSF's head of journalism and technology, summarizes Musk's evolution this way: "In the name of free speech, Musk is waging a relentless offensive against the media, stoking distrust and hatred against them. He considers X a vital source of information." He calls for action: "Democracies have a tech mogul polarizing the public debate about the media for ideological and economic reasons right under their noses. And that's why they must respond urgently. Laws must ensure that online platforms are aligned with the public interest, not least by requiring them to promote content."
Meanwhile, Musk regularly advertises that his app is number 1 in the rankings of most downloaded apps in the news section of the Apple and Android digital stores and alternates these messages with others in which he attacks some of the country's historic news brands, which he accuses wokeA decade ago, Dorsey commissioned merchandise featuring the hashtag #StayWoke and the app's iconic bird icon. Today, that would be unthinkable.
No profit, at least influence
One of the keys to understanding X's decline is the platform's economic analysis. Under Musk's leadership, it has lost a significant portion of its advertising revenue: advertisers have left en masse, unwilling to have their messages appear alongside posts containing hate speech or disinformation. From this point on, Musk seems to have accepted that the return he will obtain from this network, for which he paid $44 billion, will never be in the form of operating profits, but that he will at least obtain an ideological return that will shape its news agenda, hoping that this, in turn, will benefit the rest of his businesses.
In any case, Musk's hatred of journalists predates his acquisition of Twitter. Whenever a media outlet questioned any aspect of Tesla or SpaceX, he would immediately grab his phone to unleash his anger in the form of tweets. On one occasion, in 2016, he confessed to a SpaceX executive that he considered journalists, in general, to be "idiots." But they didn't particularly worry him: "With Twitter, we can speak directly to people. Why do we need journalists?" he argued. Six years later, he not only became one of the platform's most prominent tweeters but also bought it, which has helped him double his following: from 110 million in October 2022 to the current 229 million.
"Musk's attacks on the media are his way of promoting X for his own interests," Kate Conger, co-author with Ryan Mac of the book, explained to ARA Character limitThe article examines the tycoon's purchase of Twitter. "He positions his social network as if it were a more verified and accurate source of information. But the reality is that X has long struggled to manage the misinformation and rumors circulating on its platform, and Musk has dismantled much of the infrastructure that existed at Twitter to address these problems." By emphasizing the platform's self-regulatory capacity, the article reinforces the idea that professional mediation based on journalistic standards is unnecessary.