What’s immediately clear is that many of the men in Musk’s phone are having fun with his Twitter escapade. It is an opportunity to blithely throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. They toss out phrases like “hard reboot” and “Day Zero. Sharpen your blades boys”—to cleave through what they see as an unnecessary and ineffective workforce, perhaps. They imagine massive revenue opportunities and sweeping changes that only they can usher in. For this crew, the early success of their past companies or careers is usually prologue, and their skills will, of course, transfer to any area they choose to conquer (including magically solving free speech). But what they are actually doing is winging it.
“I’m on 20 threads with people,” the former social-media executive told me. “And it’s literally like, Damn, they were just throwing shit at the wall. The ideas people were writing in, in terms of who would be CEO—it’s some real fantasy-baseball bullshit.” Despite all the self-mythologizing and talk of building, the men in these text messages appear mercurial, disorganized, and incapable of solving the kind of societal problems they think they can.
There is a tendency, especially when it comes to the über-rich and powerful, to assume and to fantasize about what we can’t see. We ascribe shadowy brilliance or malevolence, which may very well be unearned or misguided. What’s striking about the Musk messages, then, is the similarity between these men’s behavior behind closed doors and in public on Twitter. Perhaps the real revelation here is that the shallowness you see is the shallowness you get.
Charlie Warzel is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Galaxy Brain, a newsletter about the internet and big ideas.