Elon Musk, unelected president and agent of chaos
Friday was just another day on Elon Musk’s social media platform X. Aided by an algorithm that always seems to favor the owner, his nearly 210 million followers — now greeted with the phrase “The people voted for major government reform” — watched as Musk clashed with the racist far right over the visas Silicon Valley companies use to recruit skilled foreign workers. They also received a mixed array of promotional messages from his companies — Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and X itself — heard Musk (a father of 12) warn of the global decline in birth rates, and listened to his promises of colonizing Mars. They also saw Musk amplify the argument of a Covid denier with just 327 followers, who defended Americans’ right to buy guns “so we don’t get locked in camps for having a virus with a 99.9% survival rate.”
