Dissecting Elon Musk’s Tweets: Memes, Rants, Non-public Elements and Echo Chamber

The day after Thanksgiving, almost one month after Elon Musk grew to become the proprietor of Twitter, he returned to considered one of his interest horses. “I’m simply combating totally free speech in America,” he wrote in a tweet.

One in all 28 that he posted that day — starting simply after midnight, following messages about how tasty his vacation meal was — the free speech tweet was in response to 2 followers who had been aggrieved about how Mr. Musk was being handled since buying the social community in late October. The put up was favored greater than 46,000 instances.

Mr. Musk has typically mentioned that Twitter must be extra open and crammed with a larger range of voices and factors of view. However Mr. Musk’s Twitter feed is commonly an echo chamber. He often sees, likes and replies to messages which can be about him or are posted from accounts that always act as his cheerleaders, based on a New York Occasions evaluate of his exercise on the platform.

In an effort to assess how the social community might evolve below Mr. Musk’s watch, The Occasions reviewed almost 20,000 of his tweets, analyzing posts from latest years and pictures he printed over the previous decade, in addition to the comparatively small variety of customers that he follows.

What Mr. Musk says on Twitter has an enormous attain, now greater than ever: His viewers is without doubt one of the largest, with almost 128 million accounts following him. It’s the place he solicits recommendation, conducts polls, condemns censorship and publicizes sweeping coverage modifications on the platform. As an influence consumer who now controls the corporate — he not too long ago known as himself the “chief twit” — Mr. Musk has vowed to remake the social community in his imaginative and prescient.

Of the 178 accounts that Mr. Musk adopted as of Tuesday, most had been associated to his companies, or have expressed admiration of his enterprise model, the Occasions evaluate discovered. The checklist is closely male: Solely two dozen that aren’t institutional or organizational accounts belong to girls. He’s associated to 2 of them — his mom, Maye, and sister, Tosca — and was married to a 3rd.

Amid discussions of Twitter insurance policies, web satellites from SpaceX and Tesla software program updates, his posts have a freewheeling high quality to them. He traffics in juvenile humor and vulgar jokes (photos of tape dispensers laid in sexual positions), scientific marvels (the Giant Hadron Collider), well-liked topics on far-right websites (Pepe the Frog) and critiques of divisive cultural points (“I’m not brainwashed!!”).

Mr. Musk’s posting model is conversational, and often satirical. He messages with former Democratic cupboard officers, criticizes information organizations and trades barbs with enterprise capitalists.

“The buying of Twitter was an influence transfer, politically,” mentioned Joan Donovan, the analysis director of the Shorenstein Heart on Media, Politics and Public Coverage at Harvard. “He is without doubt one of the richest man on the planet shopping for a social media firm in a transfer that’s expressly about politics and affect on tradition and on media.”

Typically, his updates are restricted to simply memes — joking photos or movies which can be copied and broadly shared. Many have origins on fringe websites or cryptocurrency message boards which can be well-liked along with his followers. Some are about him. Some seem like unique.

Mr. Musk didn’t reply to a request for remark about his exercise. At Twitter, as with a lot of his different firms, Mr. Musk has no conventional press staff. As a substitute, he tweets.

Since he created his account in June 2009, Mr. Musk has posted greater than 21,000 instances. In recent times, that has meant posting all hours of the day, most days of the week.

Mr. Musk has “made himself unignorable by changing into king of Twitter,” Ms. Donovan added.

Over a 48-hour interval in November, a second when he touted file exercise on the social community below his management, Mr. Musk posted 60 instances. His posts included commentary on the collapse of a cryptocurrency and combative responses to critiques about his office insurance policies. In a single occasion, he issued a decree about parody accounts after customers modified their profile names to mimic him.

Lots of his missives rapidly grew to become well-liked amongst his followers.

It’s unclear precisely what Mr. Musk sees in his feed. The precise sequence will depend on whether or not he has chosen to obtain algorithmic suggestions or simply tweets from accounts he follows. (He has beforehand tweeted that individuals are being “manipulated by the algorithm.”)

His exercise more and more consists of replying to customers who’ve talked about him. When he responds to accounts that he doesn’t comply with, he continuously chooses people who have complimented or praised him: In dozens of cases over the previous six months, based on the Occasions evaluation, he has replied to tweets from customers whose account descriptions point out that they help or spend money on firms owned by Mr. Musk, or that they’re followers of his management.

There are occasions when he second guesses what he broadcasts.

Over the previous two years, he has deleted lots of of tweets inside hours of posting them. In response to the PolitiTweet web site, which archives all of Mr. Musk’s tweets, he has additionally deleted dozens of tweets within the months since he acquired Twitter.

On Nov. 14, for instance, Mr. Musk tweeted that he could be “working and sleeping” at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco till the location was fastened.

A web site monitoring Mr. Musk’s personal jet motion steered that he traveled away from San Francisco round that point. He deleted the tweet 18 hours after first posting it.

However for an individual with as giant a follower base as Mr. Musk has, deleting tweets might do little to vary how broadly seen or influential these posts grow to be when they’re first printed.

“Tens of millions of individuals see his tweets, not many will discover when they’re deleted,” Ms. Donovan mentioned.

Many tweets which have landed Mr. Musk in sizzling water stay on-line.

In 2018, a couple of weeks after Mr. Musk had smoked marijuana throughout an on-camera interview for Joe Rogan’s podcast, Mr. Musk tweeted that he had the funding to take Tesla personal at $420 a share.

Consultants started to query whether or not his total feed was being produced in jest, and identified the repeated marijuana references in his tweets (together with his proposed funding value).

That incident led to prices from the Securities and Alternate Fee, and later a settlement that included monitoring of what Mr. Musk might put up about Tesla on Twitter. Shareholders at the moment are additionally searching for billions of {dollars} in damages in a lawsuit after Mr. Musk’s takeover proposal by no means materialized.

Final week, Mr. Musk joined an investor name as Tesla reported its latest quarterly earnings, which confirmed a decent soar in income regardless of a rising checklist of issues plaguing the corporate. The automaker’s blended efficiency final yr had led many to query whether or not Mr. Musk’s focus and a spotlight on Twitter had meant that he was neglecting his duties at Tesla.

Mr. Musk deflected that criticism on the earnings name, suggesting that his thousands and thousands of Twitter followers had been an indication of his recognition.

“I may not be well-liked with some individuals,” he mentioned, “however for the overwhelming majority of individuals, my follower depend speaks for itself.”