Why Do We Keep Reading About Elon Musk?
Three new books this year examine his 2022 purchase of Twitter.
Illustration: Luca Schenardi for Bloomberg
Everyone already knows the outline of the story: Elon Musk loved tweeting, saw his net worth in two years quintuple to $250 billion from the booming value of Tesla and SpaceX, casually bought 9% of languishing Twitter stock in April 2022, agreed to join the board, got annoyed by the board, irritably made an offer (with a weed-joke price) to take the company private, tried to not buy the company when he realized he paid too much, bought the company when he realized he had to, made statements about his ownership being necessary for the future of free speech, walked into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, fired most of its employees, ran into the same old problems of content moderation, became way more right-wing, and gave us a platform less advertised-on, less used, more buggy — and ultimately not Twitter at all but X.com.
Books about a story so widely covered in real time have the challenge of providing more than this outline. They also face the central question that all consumers of Elon Musk are trying to answer: How could a genius be this dumb?