Elon Musk Isn’t Funny

Sometime today, Twitter began to mess with links to Substack. Some posts that featured links could not be engaged with (in that you couldn’t “like” or “retweet” or reply to them). Sometimes, I couldn’t post a link to Substack at all.

It definitely looks a deliberate policy. If you try engaging with a tweet that contains a link to Substack a little message will appear that says “some actions on this tweet have been disabled by Twitter”. Thanks, Twitter.

Is it a coincidence that Substack are rolling out their own “Substack Notes” feature — which provides a similar service to Twitter? Is it a coincidence that Substack adviser Lulu Cheng Meservey just published a critique of Twitter’s “Twitter Blue” monetisation efforts?

Has, in other words, Elon Musk thrown a fit?

I’m not sure. But — again — it definitely looks like that.

As someone who makes money from Substack — and really enjoys reaching new readers — it’s tempting to be a bit overdramatic about this. I suppose one should resist that temptation. Corporate funny business threatens people’s livelihoods every day but we hear more about it when writers are involved because writers have a platform from which to complain.

Still — it’s a pain in the ass.

Again, it is possible that some weird Twitter bug is discriminating against Substack. Accidents happen. It is rather odd if Twitter is suppressing Substack given that so many of the “anti-woke” commentators Musk associates himself with — like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, all of whom contributed to the “Twitter Files” project — use or have used Substack. Damage to the platform will help out rival mainstream media institutions (which Musk purports to dislike) far more than Twitter.

But if Musk has launched a jihad against the platform it illuminates a huge problem he has — and that we have by extension.

Elon Musk is a smart and creative man. He’s obviously hard-working. He has iconoclastic instincts that can useful. But he lacks one thing (well, at least one thing): he isn’t funny.

This wouldn’t necessary be a problem. It’s not incumbent upon entrepreneurs to be funny. But Elon Musk desperately wants to be seen as funny.

You can see it in his endless “lol so random” memes. You can see it when he goes onstage with Dave Chappelle, gets booed and has no response except “I’m rich, bitch!” You can see it in his bugs-crawling-down-your-neckingly embarrassing appearance on Saturday Night Live. He wants to be seen as the cool and wacky billionaire — but as well as having all the natural wit of a 13-year-old gamer who is desperate to be liked, he is devastatingly sensitive (very much like a 13-year-old gamer who is desperate to be liked).

Granted, sometimes what appears to be a display of personal eccentricity from a rich and powerful man has more cynical roots. It would be very foolish to suppose that the behaviour of business magnates, bankers et cetera expresses their personalities alone and not their financial interests. But as I implied this week in a piece about Vince McMahon for Spectator World — rich people don’t stop being eccentric just because they’re rich. Personalities can poke through nonetheless — sometimes for the better but often for the worse.

Mr Musk not only owns perhaps the world’s most influential social media company — he works on the outer edges of futurist tech, with electric cars, and rocket ships, and implantable brain-computer interfaces. The extent to which his business interests will affect our future is worth considering — as well, in fairness, as his obvious curiosity and innovative spirit — but his strange impulsive bitterness when confronted with real and perceived slights is hardly an irrelevance. (Lest this seem like too sweeping a judgement, considering that I’ve already said it’s possible that he had nothing to do with this decision, let’s remember when he called a British diver “pedo guy” for not appreciating his involvement in the case of Thai schoolboys who were trapped in a cave, or when he insulted a disabled Twitter employee and then backpedaled at a thousand miles an hour.)

My suspicion is that if Musk did order that Substack links be suppressed he’ll change his mind once he’s calmed down, make a joke that doesn’t land, and go back to posting “lol so random” memes. But he needs to take up meditation or something before his worst instincts rise up in more consequential circumstances. Perhaps @Jack can help.