About Time Musk Knocked Some Sense Into Twitter!
Founder-CEOs are an entirely different breed
Half the world will want to see Musk at the helm of Twitter. The other half less so. That’s entirely predictable. Half my readers will likely identify with the title, the other half will resort to facepalms and expressions of horror. But this is precisely what every high-profile founder-CEO does. Elon wasn’t the first, nor will he be the last. As I said, before. Elon does what Elon do…
Those who didn’t spend the last three or so decades in a coma, hibernation or deep-frozen as part of a doomsday experiment, will know that the tech space was always an open stage for eccentric characters. As one of my friends, Teo, likes to say, one has got to be a tad weird to get into tech. Now, let’s not get into the definition of the word itself, but to a large enough degree I must agree. Many of us tech folks are little bit… let’s just say, out there.
The tech Gods of our times, adding fuel to the fire, made it cool and commonplace to wear jeans and T-shirts anywhere, rock up to interviews in Bermuda shorts and slippers and eat at the same table with bankers, doctors and whatever else pays well these days. If you don’t keep an eye on it, the mere fact of being in tech can drip-feed a sense of cocky arrogance into one’s behaviour, paired with a somewhat naive view of the world where nothing is truly impossible. At this point, it’s no more a God complex that’s feeding one’s drive to succeed, but a self-assumed right to become the next God in tech.
While it might sound like I’m exaggerating, I assure you, I’m not. Steve Jobs had a religious following over the years, and if we’re to be honest, he still does. It was almost coincidental that he was the CEO of Apple. Many fans, to this day, will claim that Apple was Steve Jobs himself. Looking at Tim Cook, Steve’s successor, while a successful businessman no doubt, and often called Tim Apple, it’s never for the right reasons. Tim doesn’t have a religious following. Tim is not an eccentric. Tim isn’t charismatic or weird enough. Every time I see Tim, I remember the praying/thank you emoji. 🙏 I very much doubt the same movies will be made about him after his passing, as they were of Steve. Tim wasn’t the founder, Tim isn’t Steve, and thus Tim isn’t really Apple, or the other way around.
Adam Newman was adored by many because the work-life he was selling, him being a CEO, was secondary to the story. But he was the man, the man with the vision and bucketloads of charisma. Adam was the eccentric one. The one too good for shoes, the one who wanted to turn upside down the process by which companies went public. The guy is barely 43, and there’s already a very successful docudrama TV-series made by none other than Apple about WeWork. Forget post-humous, he managed to create such a splash and ripple-effect in the tech world that now even people who knew nothing about WeWork or him, are making his story the topic of their water-cooler conversations.
Then of course, another classic case, Elizabeth Holmes, who wanted to bring the medical lab into every home. I know some would like to call tech arrogance a male ego problem, where falling for the possibility of being Gods of their own lifetime is restricted to men. I call bullshit. I’m a feminist who believes that because humans are humans regardless of gender, we all have the capacity to fall into the trap of wanting to become modern-day icons. And she has. For a long time, I rooted for her. I knew it was a long-shot, but having little to no understanding of how medical science actually worked, I believed that just like Steve made the iPhone happen, just like Musk made the Tesla and SpaceX happen, Elizabeth could potentially pull off a modern-day miracle too. She did copy Steve after all in everything she could.
Then, of course, Elon Musk. He has Aspergers, he is often half-bonkers, but people love a renegade. He also just happens to be the Tesla and Space-X CEO. Half the attention any company gets that Elon is part of, is thanks to nothing more than Elon himself. There are documentaries, and books about his life and successes. He has a massive following and for all intents and purposes in many ways he has eclipsed Steve years ago, and he doesn’t seem to want to stop either. The very platform he used for years to gather a following and drive his PR and business teams nuts, is now in the process of becoming his new shiny toy to play with. Because Elon Musk does what Elon Musk do.
And guess what? Among other outlandish ideas, he wants Donald Trump back. Back on Twitter. It’s hardly unexpected, though. I hate to bring him up, but the guy always ruled America like a temperamental CEO, not a President. Albeit a lot less successful than Musk, Trump shares many similarities with numerous eccentric founder-CEOs, including Musk and Steve. Divisive and polarising. But try becoming a high-profile founder-CEO, chances are you’ll join their club. You’ll be divisive, too. When you realise you have power, you inevitably become anti-establishment. I know what I am. I can feel it. If I were a founder-CEO, half the time you’d want to punch me, the other half you’d want to hug me.
The capacity to play God is in all of us, and tech seems to attract the loudest Gods of all.
Don’t believe me? Just look at Larry Fink, founder-CEO of BlackRock. How much of a household name is he? I don’t have numbers on that, but I struggle to remember his name ever coming up on Twitter or the news in the last few years. That guy has more fingers in more pies than any of our current tech magnates. The difference? He’s not in tech. He’s in investment management — where all the non-“out there” people go. He’s quietly controlling the world, because in his world, working from the shadows is much more lucrative. In tech, however, visibility and blinding reflector lights seem to be the recipe for success so far, even when they catch you with your pants down.
Whether Elon’s purchase of Twitter makes or not any sense to the general public, at the end of the day, is entirely irrelevant. Like many engineers, he’ll do what many of us do at one time or another — do something because we could, and then tell everyone to trust us because we’re engineers. Money and power only inflates that.
— Why did you do it?
— Because I could.
— …?!?
— Trust me, I’m an engineer.
Elon buying Twitter — if the deal does actually go through — is almost an inevitable development. In some ways, I think it’s a necessary — though evil — start of a new era — the implosion of social media. Concerns around the space are mounting by the day. Meta, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, and many others are seen as increasingly toxic environments.
Susie Kearley’s concerns around free speech and hate speech are valid, but I always wondered — having been a moderator myself for years on a 1+ million user platform, whether moderation is better than education. People don’t know how to have a civilised debate any more. It’s instant attack.
Maybe people never really did know how to have civilised debates, because we never had the space to conduct them before at this scale.
I closed my multi-year personal account on Twitter a couple of years ago because I was trying to educate on the nuances of the word master, and suggesting that we all learn to use words in context rather than on their own. No. The Twitter message was — if you use the word “master” in any context, you’re a colonialist racist. Bonkers. I’m not sure what kind of moderation is being employed on Twitter, but it certainly doesn’t curtail personal attacks, so if you ask me, moderation doesn’t really work, and maybe just maybe, it needs to get worse before it gets better.
It feels like the world is suffering of acute fury — Elon included — and needs to vent because frankly, anger-management courses were never a solution. To that, I say, though: you must treat the cause, not the symptom. I’ve said it before. Modern education is entirely incompetent — often a waste of time and money beyond 5th grade. What should be compulsory curriculum instead of calligraphy, chemistry, physics, and God knows what else, is teaching the skills of being a functioning civilised successful human. Instead, we get 15-year-olds explaining to me what communism is from two TikTok videos they saw and a quick glance at Wikipedia. WTF?!?
Half the world wants to see Musk at the helm of Twitter. The other half less so. Half my readers likely identify with the title, the other half are resorting to facepalms and expressions of horror. I’m in neither camps but weirdly enough, I’m also no Switzerland on this topic. Part of me knows that should this purchase go through, it will be a seismic shift for Twitter and — unfortunately — the world, but it also feels inevitable and somehow necessary?
Founder-CEOs in tech have a unique and often egotistical drive for disruption, and the world has a weird fetish for following personalities like theirs, and as long as that’s the case, there will always be a group saying “finally, someone to knock some sense into company X’s direction” because apparently quiet leadership in tech is not shares and newsworthy.
The next tech bubble that will burst, is the aura of its Gods. Watch this space…
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!
