A week in tweets: Elon Musk doesn’t stop posting, but what does he say? | Elon Musk

Elon Musk doesn’t stop tweeting. In just seven days last week, he made nearly 650 posts on the social network he bought in November 2022 and half-heartedly renamed X. In addition, he spent nearly three hours struggling through technical issues that he later attributed to an unproven hack to have a “conversation” with Donald Trump, and spent a couple of hours livestreaming himself playing Blizzard’s sword-and-sorcery game Diablo IV.

The sheer volume of his content alone would be impressive enough, but even considering Musk is so addicted to posting that he spent more than the budget of the Manhattan Project to purchase the site, his consistency is alarming.

Over the course of the week the Guardian analyzed the tweets, there was a 90-minute period – between 3am and 4.29am local time – in which he did not post a single tweet. In every other half-hour period, day or night, he sent at least one tweet. He posted at 4.41am on Saturday mornings, 2.30am on Wednesday nights, and at 11pm on six out of seven days.

This week, Musk’s longest uninterrupted stretch of no tweets — another person might safely call it “bedtime” — lasted just seven and a half hours, sleeping in until 8:10 a.m. after an all-night posting session. His shortest night’s rest was on Saturday night, when he logged off after retweeting a meme comparing London’s Metropolitan Police to the Nazi SS, before coming back online four and a half hours later to retweet a crypto influencer complaining about jail sentences for Britons who took part in protests.

Wow, woke up, cool

Not all of Musk’s content on X is rich in subtext. The vast majority of his posts are simple, one- or two-word responses to fans, followers, and fellow travelers. “Cool,” he replies to a construction industry influencer who posts an AI-generated picture of herself, two minutes before he replies “Cool” to a photo montage of a Tesla Cybertruck driving around North America, and one minute after he replies “💯” to an AI-generated cartoon of himself pointing to a sign that reads, “On this platform, we love criticism.”

Sometimes a monosyllabic response is a double-edged sword: Musk, who has never adhered to conventional “netiquette,” will occasionally reply to a message with the “😂” emoji before copying it directly into his own feed without attribution. Why some get a valued retweet from Musk and others get their posts stolen and reposted is unclear.

Occasionally, Musk manages to be even more restrained with his praise, especially from users he doesn’t like to agree with too loudly. Posts from End Wokeness about an early release law in California, from a Malaysian far-right influencer about a Haitian criminal, and from Libs of TikTok about another law in California are all met with a simple “!!” from Musk. Others don’t even get that: A post from far-right influencer Dom Lucre, whose ban from the site for posting child abuse images Musk personally lifted in 2023, received just a single “!” from the billionaire.

Unrest and Grok

Musk’s agitation over the unrest in the UK appears to have deepened his connection to the far right. Last week, he struck up a conversation with Canadian influencer Lauren Southern, one of three anti-Islam activists banned from entering the UK by Theresa May’s government in 2018. As well as chatting about their shared distrust of the media, Musk has also become a paying subscriber to her feed, supporting her with £4.92 a month, as he does with more than 160 other users.

But there is a method behind Musk’s apparent madness. As a showman, the memes and chats he retweets and reposts are chock-full of whatever he wants to promote that day. Sometimes that’s a professional thing: On Wednesday and Thursday, after his AI company xAI released the latest version of its Grok language model, a significant portion of his posts consisted of quotes and images generated by that model.

And then there are the riots. The working week diverted Musk’s attention from tensions in the UK, but the constant drumbeat of the verdict over the weekend meant he was ready to engage in some mild incitement.

He seized on the right-wing meme that Keir Starmer was promoting a “two-tier police force” by constantly highlighting the punishments for rioters while downplaying their involvement in violence. Early on Friday morning, he extended his criticism to the SNP’s Humza Yousaf, calling the former Scottish First Minister a “super-super racist” and urging him to sue him in response.

Trump and Tesla

On Monday and Tuesday, Musk drew attention to his conversation with Donald Trump: In advance, he shared excited posts from fans about how many people were likely to tune in and what the two smartest men in the world would talk about. After the livestream ended, he again posted aggrieved complaints about the biased media not writing positive headlines and urged fans to condense the conversation into a more manageable, hour-long highlight reel.

For all his friction, another side of Musk comes out when he talks about his two biggest companies, Tesla and SpaceX. Especially with Tesla, a publicly traded company, he has to be careful what he says. Musk has a fiduciary duty to shareholders as well as legal obligations about how he can disclose important information. That culminated when the SEC sued him over an infamous tweet in which he falsely claimed he had “secured funding” to take Tesla off the stock market. In the ensuing settlement with the regulator, Musk agreed to have a lawyer review all of his tweets about Tesla – a deal he has since regretted.

But even after an appeal to the Supreme Court, the deal stands, and Musk’s last chance to free himself from the “Twitter sitter” was thrown out in April of this year. And so his posts about Tesla are surprisingly restrained: Shortly after his conversation with Trump, he even published a long, almost normal statement in which he walked back some of his comments on climate change. “To be clear, I believe global warming is real,” he began, before explaining that he was merely suggesting that high CO2 levels would exist even without global warming.₂ were dangerous.

“The Guardian is rubbish…”

Musk also used the opportunity to attack another popular target: the Guardian. After the newspaper quoted experts who called the article “the dumbest climate talk ever,” Musk lashed out at others he followed who shared the article, telling author Stephen King that the Guardian “cannot be considered objective” and entrepreneur Vinod Khosla that the Guardian is “garbage.”