The Making of an Anti-Woke Zealot: How Elon Musk Was Infected with the MAGA Mind-Virus

“This is going to sound somewhat melodramatic, but I was worried it was having a corrosive effect on civilization,” Elon Musk told Joe Rogan in November 2023. The “it” the world’s richest man was concerned with was “wokeness, a term popularized during the 2010s that generally means being “awake” to the systems of racial and other oppression that undergird much of American life and history.

This philosophy that would “normally be quite niche and geographically constrained,” Musk worried, “was given an information technology weapon to propagate what is essentially a mind virus to the rest of the Earth.”

Musk’s comments should have come as no surprise. He was getting redpilled (converted to the far right). Two years earlier, the billionaire had tweeted, “traceroute woke_mind_virus”; in computer programming, “traceroute” is a command that looks for the root of information. In the year before the tweet, Musk’s daughter Vivian announced she had transitioned from her birth gender, a moment a Musk aide pointed to as a motivator for the billionaire’s rightward swing.

But the decline began earlier. In July 2018, Musk embarrassed himself in front of the entire world by offering to construct a ridiculous and unworkable submarine to rescue children stuck in a Thai cave; after British caver Vern Unsworth refused his “help,” Musk called Unsworth a “pedophile.” A few months later, in September, Musk went on Rogan’s show to do damage control as his erratic behavior threatened to derail his business plans.

It didn’t work. Tesla’s stock dropped after an image from the show of Musk smoking a joint and ranting about AI and the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix went viral. His narcissism and grasping need for praise and attention soon took him to the right as liberals began to distance themselves from his behavior. Negative attention—combined with Musk’s established distaste for rules, regulations, and taxes—pushed the billionaire toward a more credulous and conservative audience.

Musk’s comments should have come as no surprise. He was getting redpilled (converted to the far right).

In 2020, Musk was further radicalized by COVID-19. Skeptical from the beginning of the severity of the pandemic and angry over how public health–minded lockdowns were stifling production, he faced down California authorities to keep Tesla factories open.

That summer, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country, giving the left a cause to rally around; in November, Joe Biden was elected president. After the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, the right—looking for something to rally around that wasn’t tied to an attempted coup—made “woke” a catchall for their grievances.

Musk began combining all his complaints into one overarching idea: the threat of wokeness, which he saw as censorious and against the meritocracy he believed existed in Silicon Valley. As Musk became more and more obsessed with woke, his right-wing friends cheered him on. Always desperately in need of approval, the world’s richest man lapped up the praise and decided it was time to get more involved in Twitter, the social media site where he was fast becoming a major celebrity.

He began the process by getting on the company’s board but soon found the position too restrictive. Musk convinced himself that he could quintuple the site’s revenue by 2028 if he had control. He secured funding from Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital, Binance, and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as funds from Dubai and Qatar.

By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.

Despite his bluster about buying Twitter, Musk went back and forth on the deal. In more rational moments, he realized it was a mistake and tried to back out. Musk’s approach to strategy and tactics can be seen in the way he played cards, as Max Levchin recounted.

“There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” he told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said, ‘Right, fine, I’m done.’”

Eventually, Musk was sued by Twitter’s management to agree to the sale. Musk was unable to force the company to a lower price than the gag cost of $54.20 a share, a price he had posted as a joke for his followers as a play on the association “420” has with cannabis. He faced certain doom in court and begrudgingly bought the company in October 2022.

A few days before the deal closed, he visited the headquarters and was disgusted with the company’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion. To Musk, these were signs of weakness. Once in charge, he slashed staff and installed loyalists.

Isaacson argues Musk was irrationally passionate about Twitter in large part because he had paid too much for it and was incapable of thinking logically about the business. It’s true that $44 billion was an overvaluation, but the implication that Musk wasn’t thinking rationally once he was trapped only works if he had been capable of making a sound business decision about Twitter in the first place. Making a meme share price offer doesn’t indicate that this was ever the case.

His passions overrode basic logic particularly when it came to the site’s content moderation. Unfortunately for Musk, moderation was important for running the company. As he tried to make Twitter into an anti-woke, far-right message board, Musk began tilting into extremism and conspiracy theories. The venue he claimed was for unfettered free speech was simply becoming a venue for right-wing speech.

That was no good for advertisers; predictably, revenue collapsed. Twitter had long struggled to avoid placing ads next to extremist content, and Musk’s cuts didn’t help.

Initially, Twitter’s trust and safety department head Yoel Roth was the only one with access to content moderation tools. Roth tried to hold a line on some content but soon found himself at odds with Musk and his allies.

Their requests were fundamentally unworkable on a technical level. Del Harvey, a former Twitter staffer who was the company’s first head of trust and safety, told Wired in November 2023 that part of the problem was that advertising “was built on an entirely separate tech stack than all of the rest of Twitter.”

“Imagine two buildings next to each other with no communication between them,” Harvey said.

The possibility of identifying problematic content on the organic side couldn’t easily be integrated into the promoted content side. It was this ouroboros of a situation, two sides locked in this internal struggle of not getting the information because they didn’t connect the two.

Unwilling to admit error, Musk blamed activists. The platform of open discourse that had been promised was in no way universal—Musk demanded Roth ban boycotts, reasoning that this would stop people from pressuring advertisers to step away from an increasingly toxic platform. Predictably, it acted as a kind of “Streisand effect,” so named for the pop star whose attempts to stop people from talking about her mega mansion in the early 2000s only made it more of a story, and backfired.

Musk continued to make decisions based on his anger over wokeness and his pathological need for praise rather than sound business practices. Verified “blue checks” were once the marker on Twitter that let the audience know that the accounts they were interacting with were who they said they were, whether it was Kraft Cheese or Kamala Harris, Chappell Roan or Boeing.

But for the right-wing figures who had Musk’s ear, blue checks were a sign of elitism. The new CEO’s solution was as stupid as it was doomed to fail: he’d clear the former verified users of their checkmarks and allow people to buy their way into verification.

For the right-wing figures who had Musk’s ear, blue checks were a sign of elitism.

This was explained as necessary to fight vaguely defined “bots.” However, he had fired too many staffers to be able to properly vet users. Predictably, people paid for verification and impersonated popular brands and celebrities. It was, in short, a total disaster that has done more to harm the company’s public image and finances than anything left-wing users ever tried.

Desperate to change the narrative away from a lengthening laundry list of mistakes at the company, Musk formed a war room called the “hot box,” staffed by a small cohort of toady loyalists including members of Musk’s own family. The team began going through private Slack messages and channel posts from employees to root out dissent and poor attitudes.

This wasn’t exactly free speech, but Musk didn’t care. He wanted to end negativity in the workplace by any means necessary (other than examining and confronting his own level of responsibility). Ironically, Twitter had already changed. He had fired so many people that it felt like a different company.

Musk was paranoid about what he saw as employees’ bad behavior. And he hoped to expose the rot at the core of the entire company, particularly to his critics on the left and his friends on the right. To champion these “revelations,” ally David Sacks suggested Musk approach Matt Taibbi, the onetime acerbic liberal hero whose politics had been drifting right since the Me Too attacks in 2017.

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After years of confrontational commentary on the financial industry and questioning the mainstream, Taibbi fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power late in 2022. And he did so to gain access. Musk delivered it—in the form of internal documents showing how Twitter had responded to requests for censorship from the government and made decisions on questionable content—to Taibbi on a platter.

The result was the so-called Twitter Files reporting. Announced in a grandiose, seemingly endless Twitter thread—publishing on the platform was one of the prerequisites for Taibbi accessing the files in the first place—the findings themselves were, for the most part, smoke and mirrors.

When Taibbi released the initial reporting on December 2, 2022, it was clearly meant to be a world-changing news event on par with Glenn Greenwald’s reporting on the NSA leaks. The reality fell well short of that goal.

The files revealed some of the inner workings of a major social media company, but it was hardly a bombshell. Instead, the findings aligned with Musk’s personal agenda against former Twitter employees and management, including actions the site had taken against harmful and bigoted posts that Musk had approved of, mostly relating to trans issues.

Taibbi’s first thread focused on the Hunter Biden laptop story and Twitter’s decision to suppress a New York Post article on the matter in advance of the 2020 election. This story—similar to the one that led Greenwald to leave The Intercept two years earlier, and which had spawned a number of right-wing conspiracies—didn’t deliver.

If anything, the files showed a flawed but exhaustive effort on the part of Twitter executives to manage the fallout and attempt to make the right determination. The laptop story was an example of Twitter’s resistance to being tarred by the same brush as Facebook was after 2016.

The company overcorrected while carefully attempting to “get it right,” restricting the Post story on the basis that it was likely hacked materials. Taibbi’s reporting pulled the curtain back a little more on the decision-making process but didn’t uncover any new motivations or reveal anything nefarious or dangerous.

Taibbi claimed Democrats had a lot of power to push the company to restrict, suspend, or ban accounts because the staff at Twitter in charge of those decisions leaned left. Despite the implications of the reporting and comments made by Musk, Taibbi later admitted there was no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story decision.

“Although several sources recalled hearing about a ‘general’ warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence—that I’ve seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story,” Taibbi tweeted. Twitter executives would later say under oath that the story had been suppressed because it violated the company’s Hacked Materials Policy.

Critics charged that Taibbi and Musk, by working together, had actually deployed a coordinated leak rather than a neutral release of information. Mehdi Hasan tweeted that Taibbi was “volunteering to do online PR work for the world’s richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives,” all while pretending to speak truth to power.

The files didn’t reveal a corrupt system, Stanford Internet Observatory research manager Renée DiResta argued in December 2022, days after the first report. Instead, Taibbi’s exposé showed a group of people managing “high-stakes, unanticipated events” within the parameters of the company’s terms of service.

Soon after Taibbi’s first installment, reporter Mike Masnick said the bombshell was a dud. “There was absolutely nothing of interest,” Masnick told Tech Policy Press’s Justin Hendrix. “It was almost exactly things that Twitter had said publicly in the days and weeks after all of this went down, that the company had a policy in place around hacked materials.”

While Masnick agreed broadly with the position that social media restricting the laptop reporting was a “bad policy,” he added that didn’t mean that getting a Musk-curated view into the decision-making process was helpful. If anything, it was actively harmful because it didn’t show intervention from the main actors Taibbi had implied were involved in the attempted suppression. “There’s no evidence of the government actually getting involved trying to suppress it,” Masnick said, “or even the Biden campaign trying to suppress the story.”

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote that it would have been better if the documents had been published in the open internet philosophy Musk and Taibbi were implicitly claiming.

Someone else picked up what should have been the topline story. Looking at the same batch of files, Lee Fang at The Intercept reported on how Twitter was using “whitelisting” (a way for the social media site to boost certain accounts and narratives) to promote United States Central Command-affiliated accounts providing information about Yemen, Kuwait, and Syria without disclosing their government affiliation.

To his credit, Fang was quite clear that Twitter “allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive.”

That was hardly the kind of transparent investigative reporting undertaken by Taibbi. His version of the Twitter Files was really just a controlled infodump.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote that it would have been better if the documents had been published in the open internet philosophy Musk and Taibbi were implicitly claiming: “I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions.”

Nonetheless, right-wing actors supported the reporting, lending Taibbi their platforms and hyping the story. Tucker Carlson, then still on Fox, called the files evidence of “a systemic violation of the First Amendment, the largest example of that in modern history”; House GOP committee members seized on the reporting as evidence of a conspiracy to elect Biden.

It’s worth noting that when Democrats did essentially the same thing after the 2016 election—holding hearings about how Russia and social media companies had conspired to elect Donald Trump—Taibbi had criticized those efforts.

Subsequent documents showed that the Trump administration routinely demanded material be taken down by the company, often on less firm grounds than the Biden campaign had on the laptop or the photos of Hunter.

But why would Taibbi highlight that? Instead, he chose to publish the Hunter Biden story first, focusing on right-wing red meat that agitated the base but didn’t provide much in the way of news. Right-wing commentators and the conservative audience Taibbi was desperate to cultivate loved it.

His Twitter account blew up, and his Substack—already incredibly successful—gained thousands of subscriptions. The reporting generated a financial windfall for the writer, even if its findings were dismissed by more sober commentators.

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From Owned by Eoin Higgins, courtesy Bold Type Books.