In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a South African-American businessman and social media figure, Elon Musk (@elonmusk). He’s best-known for being the wealthiest man in the world, running companies like Tesla Inc., SpaceX and Twitter/X, and for parroting the Kremlin’s propaganda narratives.

Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy family. His father co-owned an emerald mine in Zambia, and he also invested in some of Elon’s early business ventures in mid 90’s. The company, Zip2, was later in 1999 sold to Compaq for 307 million USD.

In 1999 Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services company that merged with an online bank & eventually became PayPal. The company’s key figures were referred to as the “PayPal Mafia” & included people like the anti-woke crusaders Peter Thiel & @davidsacks.
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Musk’s various business ventures have made him the richest man in the world. He demands a lot from his employees, expecting them to work for long hours, often removing the possibility of working remotely. He fires people en masse, and all employees sign strict NDAs.

Musk has also taken the Giving Pledge, committing to give the majority of his wealth to charitable causes. In 2022, Forbes gave him the worst score in the philanthropy rating, since he had only given less than 1% of his fortune to charity. Soros was the biggest giver of all.

Musk has been an active Twitter user since 2009, and he’s the platform’s biggest account by far with over 140 million followers. Throughout the years, he has provoked controversy with his tweets. Some of these incidents include comparing Justin Trudeau to Hitler, …

…calling the cave explorer who played a crucial role in saving 12 children from a cave in Thailand a “pedo guy” and “child rapist”. Due to his success in business and developing future technologies, Musk has garnered a large group of faithful and fervent followers.

Like his old friend @davidsacks, Elon also likes to promote his ideas on absolutely everything, even when he doesn’t have any expertise on knowledge on the topic (like the cave rescue operation) — a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Musk showed interested in buying Twitter as early as in 2017, and had previously criticized the platform for lack of free speech. He started buying Twitter shares already in January 2022, and eventually bought the platform for 44 billion USD in October 2022. The idea of buying…

…Twitter & making it “radically free speech” allegedly came from Elon’s ex-wife @TalulahRiley, who’d texted Elon “Please do something to fight woke-ism. I will do anything to help!” Riley had specifically cited the ban of a conservative news satire website, @TheBabylonBee.

Prior to Musk’s buyout of Twitter, the platform used so-called blue check marks to identify prominent figures and organizations. Musk quickly removed these, and introduced a blue tick that anyone could buy. This would provide them boost in the algorithm, and he declared…

…that this would provide real free speech. Previously he stated that the “Price [would be] adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity.” As of today, Twitter Blue’s pricing is almost identical in every country where it’s available, including Madagasgar, …

…one of the poorest countries in the world. For only +20% of their annual income, average Madagasgarians can get some REAL free speech — thanks Elon!

He also sponsored the blue tick to the poorest of the poor, including @KingJames, @WilliamShatner and @StephenKing.

Elon also quickly started firing old Twitter employees, getting rid of 80% of its workforce. He said stated that the process was “painful”, but at the same time mocked many of these individuals on Twitter. One especially disgusting example of this was when he mocked…

…Haraldur Thorleifsson, or @iamharaldur, an Icelandic national hero who suffers from muscular dystrophy. Musk also fired the team that fought against coordinated propaganda campaigns by countries such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. Research by Darren Linvill et al…

…found out that many disabled troll farms had become active again after the buyout.

Apparently, none of Elon’s friends haven’t told him about the study that fake news spread 6 times faster on Twitter than truthful content. As of today, this number is probably higher.

This type of research has become much more expensive since the buyout, as Musk has increased the API costs astronomically — access to 50 million tweets per month costs a whopping 42 000 USD.He also removed the free, basic API access used by many indie developers & academics.

Elon has attempted to combat disinformation on Twitter with “improved” community notes that he’s called a “game changer”. It’s basically a crowdsourced (= free for Elon) feature where Twitter users can add context to tweets.

In May 2023, Musk’s interview was hit with community notes over his claims that there’s “no proof” that the Texas mall shooter was a white supremacist, and that @bellingcat is a “psyop”. As of today, the community note has been removed.

Musk also provides a lot of publicity to known conspiracy theorists like al-Assad apologist and pro-Kremlin pundit, @aaronjmate, QAnon-affiliated @KanekoaTheGreat, social media grifter @stillgray, and of course fugitive @KimDotcom. When I asked for his comment…

…on this soup, Elon replied indirectly (I assume he didn’t want to promote me in any way) to his old “war room” buddy and pro-Kremlin investor, @davidsacks, declaring that “This platform now cares about the truth, even if we don’t like the truth.”

It’s somewhat ironic that the people who declare to be running a “free speech platform” that “cares about the truth”, seem to be afraid to have any kind of discussion. I guess they don’t want their own “truth” to be challenged, after all?

End of part one.

In the second part of this series, I’ll focus more on Elon’s comments on the Russo-Ukrainian War, including Elon’s (or David Sacks’) “peace plan”, the undermining of neutral investigations, and promotion of pro-Kremlin narratives.

Stay tuned for more!

APPENDIX: Both Elon’s and Errol (Elon’s father) version about the emerald mine biz can be found here:

Elon Musk provides critical c…