It’s not exactly a secret that Elon Musk’s luck at Tesla didn’t translate well once he took over Twitter. Ad revenue is down, users are leaving and it’s become mostly useless for finding trustworthy news sources. And apparently, those problems have hit Musk hard. Even harder than any of us might have previously guessed. Following the takeover, Musk began to “spiral down,” and at one point, it got so bad that Twitter employees considered calling for a wellness check on him because they were worried he might hurt himself, author Ben Mezrich claimed in a recent interview with CNBC.
Mezrich, who previously wrote about Facebook in “The Social Network,” recently published “Breaking Twitter,” a look inside the social media company after Musk took over, told CNBC, “The Elon before Twitter and the Elon after Twitter are two different Elons. Elon didn’t just break Twitter. Twitter broke Elon Musk.” Mezerich also believes a big reason for Elon’s spiral is that for the first time ever, he finally had to face the fact that he’s an incredibly unpopular person.
“I think he truly cares about his reputation, and he was shocked… Chapelle brought him on stage with him, and he got booed. And this had never happened to Elon before. And this spiral started, his kid’s car got attacked, you know, and he started throwing people off Twitter in the middle of the night,” he told CNBC.
According to Mezrich, Musk’s downward spiral really kicked off not long after he killed off Twitter’s verification system, causing many prominent users to quit using the social network. Anyone even remotely paying attention at the time could have told him that was a terrible idea, but he went ahead with it anyway. Predictably, as hate speech and conspiracy theories were more prominently featured on the site, advertisers began leaving in droves, too.
Hopefully, Elon can get some help in the near future because this is legitimately worrying news. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that his problems are entirely of his own creation. People would probably like him a lot more if he hadn’t shown himself to be a hateful bigot who amplifies antisemitism far-right propaganda and misinformation.