There are many damning anecdotes in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s new book, “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” but one from February of last year perfectly captures the astonishing pettiness of the world’s richest man. Attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, Musk had one of the most luxurious seats in the house, but rather than watching the game, he was glued to his phone in dismay. Both he and President Joe Biden had sent tweets cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles, but even though Biden had far fewer followers than Musk on the platform, the president’s tweet garnered 29 million views to Musk’s 8.
4 million. Livid, Musk demanded that his engineers find out why his tweet was underperforming Biden’s. He left the game early to fly back to his San Francisco office, where dozens of employees were summoned to meet him on a Sunday night.
Eventually, to placate their boss, the engineers tweaked Twitter’s algorithm to boost Musk’s posts, pushing them into users’ feeds whether they follow him or not. “In effect, Musk’s tweets would have higher priority over any other post,” write Conger and Mac, technology reporters for The New York Times. As they put it toward the end of the book, “A man allergic to criticism had bought himself the largest audience in the world, and hoped for praise.
” No wonder he and Trump get along. What Trump has done to the Republican Party, Musk has done to Twitter, which he’s renamed X. It was always ba.
