Elon owns Twitter. He wants to own your attention.
He's the host of a round-the-clock reality show.
Before Donald Trump became president — and a threat to the Constitution — he was a reality TV star.
All of this is known, of course. So is the way Trump’s TV stardom provided a foundation for his political career. The man’s businesses kept failing, but The Apprentice allowed him to present the public the image of success, and of bold, firm command his circumstances. He seemed like the kind of guy who could lead. It was all a show, but a substantial portion of the American public was convinced.
We know what happened then.
This seems worth mentioning because of, well, Elon Musk. I hate to write about him again, but the billionaire owner of Twitter seems determined to make himself the center of everybody’s attention — and, on Twitter at least, he seems to be succeeding. (If you do a scan of Google News’ business headlines, it seems that he dominates attention even beyond his own platform.)
A lot has been written about how Elon’s ascendancy might affect our politics. He’s let Trump back on the platform, though Trump hasn’t returned so far. He’s also let Kanye return, only to boot Kanye back off when Kanye kept being his wildly anti-Semitic self. Researchers say that hate speech on Twitter is rising at “unprecedented rates.”
But I’m not sure that all of this is the point. What Elon wants is to be Twitter’s main character, in perpetuity.
Photo by Jorge Urosa
About a year ago, Mashable’s Christianna Silva offiered a pretty good definition of the “main character” idea — one that, perhaps not coincidentally, included Elon as an example.
Every few weeks, Twitter is taken over by a Main Character — a person who, seemingly independent of planning, becomes all anyone on the app can talk about for approximately 12 to 24 hours.
Sometimes, the Main Character is an easy one to catch, like when Elon Musk says any of those things Elon Musk says, or when Mark Zuckerberg barbecues or goes hydrofoiling. And, of course, there are those characters on Twitter who are controversial by nature and, with their large followings, are seemingly automatic victims of the Main Character farm.
In Silva’s telling, becoming the “main character” is a bad thing. You’ve probably done something embarrassing or wrong. If you’re not one of the world’s most famous people and suddenly flooded with attention, that probably is a bad thing.
But if you’re used to being the center of the universe — if, in fact, that is your goal — then it’s something else entirely. And if you have the right amount if clout — if, say, you’re the president of the United States or the world’s richest man — you don’t have to wait to accidentally become the main character. You can actively cultivate it.
Elon is actively cultivating it.
Photo by Brett Jordan
I hate that I know this. On my Twitter account, Elon is blocked because I don’t want to think about him all the time when I’m online. It doesn’t matter, because everybody else is thinking and talking about him all the time. If you’re going to be on Twitter right now, he’s unavoidable — the way that Trump used to be a few years ago.
All of this crystallized for me, though, on Saturday night — when Elon hosted a show on “Twitter Spaces.” Essentially it’s AM talk radio, but for folks consumed by social media.
The purpose of the show was to talk about the supposed revelations about why pre-Elon Twitter blocked stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election.
Musk acknowledged on a Twitter Spaces audio chat Saturday afternoon some missteps including “a few cases where I think we should have excluded some email addresses.”
“The idea here is to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future,” Musk said during the Twitter Spaces which was plagued with technical difficulties. Musk said he joined via a Starlink satellite connection from his private jet.
I think, though, that this is the real point.
Donald Trump used his main character-ness to become president and aborb our every waking moment of attention for four years. We know that he wanted to do his own radio show from the White House. I wonder how things would be different if he’d been able to use Twitter (his favorite platform) to broadcast that show. Elon will never become president — not, at least, as long as the current Constitution holds — but maybe that isn’t the point. Maybe the point is to be the host of a round-the-clock reality show in which Elon both makes and comments on and creates news. Maybe the point is to cement his main character status. And with it, to cement his own power.
Maybe the point is to simply colonize our attention.