What broke my relationship with Elon Musk
How I went from having an "ELONMUSK" license plate to wanting nothing to do with the "Technoking" billionaire, and how he could win me back.
Elon Musk, mesmerized by his own Twitter feed, in front of a crowd. Created in part with Midjourney AI.
When I was in high school I was enamored with Steve Jobs. I'll never forget the first time I held an iPhone. It felt magical. In the same way many parts of religion feels mystical; technology, for better or worse, gave off a similar vibe.
Steve Jobs was the central prophet of this tech religion. I watched every Apple event and devoured any Jobs-related content I could find. He seemed so prophetic and wise. At Apple, he wasn’t just making computers, digital media players, and phones; it felt like he was changing the world through technology.
His death in 2011 felt like such a loss. Tech, for a short time, felt void. Tim Cook took over for Jobs, but his persona didn’t have the same allure. As time went on, a new tech entrepreneur came into the spotlight who I thought could fill the void Jobs had left. His name was Elon.
Elon Reeve Musk was a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded PayPal but was forced out of the company. He used the money he got from his PayPal payout to start up a risky private space company: SpaceX. Then he went on to invest more money in another long-shot venture, an electric vehicle startup called Tesla Motors. He would eventually become its CEO and Co-Founder.
It was Tesla that truly piqued my interest in Elon. Electric cars were already hard to convince people to buy at the time. Tesla had to overcome that obstacle while also starting a new car company from scratch. Its success seemed unlikely, but if it did accomplish its mission, it would change the world. That made Tesla all the more enthralling to follow. Who doesn’t want to root for the underdog?
I streamed every Tesla event, just like I did with Apple events, holy days for those who observe. I followed Musk on Twitter, getting a notification every time he Tweeted. Musk was a prolific tweeter, using the platform to his advantage, marketing his company for free. He also used it to form a direct connection with his followers, often answering questions and looking into customer issues tweeted at him.
He had a sense of humor and charm. A perfect example of this was when he wanted Tesla’s car models to spell the word “SEXY.” (At the time, Tesla had planned for a Model S, Model E, Model X and Model Y.) Ford owned the Trademark to the Model E and wouldn’t let Tesla use it. At the next shareholder meeting, Musk quipped, “They are killing SEX.”
That was such a Steve Jobs thing to say. It was blunt, a bit irreverent, but also cheeky. It was this personality that helped him gain a cult following, just like Jobs. For a time, I considered myself a member of this club, going so far as to change my license plate to “ELONMUSK".
My naive decision to tie myself to Elon’s brand via a license plate in 2016.
In March 2016, I found myself lining up with about 200 people to put down $1,000 on a Model 3, Tesla's newest mass-market electric vehicle. Those of us who reserved a Model 3 did so without even seeing the car. That's how much trust we had in Elon and Tesla.
The two-year wait felt like an eternity. I hung on every statement Elon made on Twitter, hoping it was a clue about some Model 3 feature. I tuned in to every quarterly earnings call. I even listened to the Ride the Lightning Tesla Motors weekly podcast and enjoyed hearing everyone’s theories on the Model 3. Saying I was a Tesla enthusiast at this point was a gigantic understatement.
Delivery day with my Model 3.
When I finally got the car in March 2018, I was ecstatic. It was a fantastic product, and I couldn’t believe I was finally driving the car I had been obsessing about for two years. As part of the process, I decided to trade in my “ELONMUSK” license plate for a normal one. I thought that plate on a Tesla was a bit redundant, and I didn’t want to keep paying the NC fee to have a custom plate.
I didn’t realize at the time how good of a move that was.
Then the Tweets started
Soon after I took delivery of my car, Elon’s tweets started to get weirder. He impulsively tweeted that he was taking Tesla private at $420 a share, “funding secured.” It was not. This tweet quickly kicked off a long battle with the Securities Exchange Commission, as well as other lawsuits.
2018 was also the year Musk went on to call Vernon Unsworth a "pedo guy.” Elon was responding to a comment Unsworth made on CNN about Musk’s offer to use a submersible to help save kids trapped in a cave. Unsworth dismissed it as a “PR stunt” and said that Musk should “stick his submarine where it hurts.”
Unsworth’s words clearly hurt Musk, but Musk bizarrely doubled down on his claim Unsworth was a pedophile.
Elon was starting to appear very different from Steve Jobs. Jobs didn’t have outbursts in public for the world to see. Maybe Musk was just having a bad year, I thought. We now know Tesla almost went bankrupt again during this period. Maybe he’ll get some sleep and get off Twitter for a bit?
The knight from Indiana Jones throwing shade at Elon’s Twitter habit.
In the several years following the “pedo” tweet, Musk’s public behavior continued to deteriorate. He said the pandemic was dumb. He tweeted “FREE AMERICA NOW” in response to lockdowns. He spoke out against the shelter-in-place restrictions during a Tesla earnings call, likening them to “forcibly imprisoning people in their homes” and calling them “fascist.” He tweeted Tesla’s stock price was too high, causing it to fall. He replied to a Tweet from Bernie Sanders with, “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.” He boosted the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. He antagonized Bill Gates after finding out Gates was shorting Tesla stock.
He tweeted, “Pronouns suck” and “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” We now know Musk has a daughter who is transgender and changed her last name to disassociate herself from her father.
Musk, for a three-day period, embraced Kayne West’s 2020 presidential run, only to hilariously backtrack (over Twitter of course).
He tried to come up with a solution to the war in Ukraine via a Twitter poll. He embraced Ron DeSantis, a provocative politician who notably signed legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people.
Every time he tweeted some bizarre or antagonistic thought, I mentally took one step away from Musk.
By the beginning of 2022, I couldn’t find any resemblance between the Musk I thought I knew and the one I was seeing now. Jobs was a class act. Elon was a class clown. I kept thinking, what did any of this have to do with electric cars or going to Mars?
Elon bought Twitter: let that sink in
Elon had always been addicted to Twitter. When the opportunity finally arose for him to buy it, he couldn’t help himself. He wanted it so badly that he signed away all of his leverage and forwent all due diligence in his $43 billion dollar offer to acquire the company. Once Twitter’s board accepted his offer, he couldn’t get out of the deal if he wanted to! He wanted to. He did try to get out of it.
Elon’s clear lack of judgment as a Twitter user had finally bled over into his business dealings. Sure, there were stories of Musk being erratic at Tesla, becoming obsessed with automation and his factory looking like an alien dreadnought. Or randomly firing people around the factory just because he felt like it. But you could chalk up that behavior as part of Musk’s persona, explaining it away as “sometimes geniuses are erratic.”
Buying Twitter was different. If his tweets and behavior were erratic before, buying Twitter sent him into overdrive.
He fired hundreds of Twitter workers and demanded random celebrities pay him for a new Twitter Blue subscription, even though they were the ones creating the content that made Twitter valuable in the first place! He threatened to suspend users’ accounts if they linked to rival platforms and blocked Substack links for a time. He tweaked the Twitter algorithm because President Biden’s tweet about the Super Bowl performed better than his. All of these actions were taken while Elon promoted Twitter as a free speech digital town square. Clearly, Elon had a different definition of what free speech meant.
To say the Twitter acquisition has been a disaster would be an understatement. It's distracted Elon from Tesla. It spun up Twitter rivals, including BlueSky, a decentralized Twitter clone that Twitter itself spun out three years before Musk took over. Six months after the acquisition, Twitter has shed at least 50% of its initial valuation.
The last straw
The last straw for me came in December 2022, when one of Musk’s tweets played into the far-right trope of gay people being child groomers.
Musk was hurt that Yoel Roth, the former Twitter head of trust and safety, resigned from his position at Twitter via email, while Musk was speaking in a company meeting.
Yoel had stayed on for the Elon Twitter transition, believing he could still do good at the company within his Trust and Safety organization. As the weeks went on, Yoel and Elon disagreed more and more over Twitter's content moderation policy and the upcoming launch of Twitter Blue. Eventually, Yoel felt that he had no choice but to resign.
Elon responded to Yoel’s resignation not in person, not in text, but in a public tweet:
Elon knowingly played into an anti-gay trope at a time when legislators across the United States were targeting gay and transgender people through various laws. This tweet also stirred up so many crazies against Yoel and his family, they had to flee their home.
What. The. Fuck.
In a fit of rage, I deleted Twitter from all my devices and drastically reduced my use of the platform, limiting it to promotional purposes only. I began promoting other social media sites above Twitter and removed it from the title card of my YouTube videos. I was done supporting Elon and his companies.
Elon could start to repair the damage
Could Elon win me back one day? Maybe, though I think it’s unlikely. I’m someone who believes in second chances, but Elon has dug himself into a pretty big hole.
On the off chance he were to ask me, “Okay, Josh, what could I do to turn around my image?” This is what I would tell him:
Tone down the culture war, hobgoblin impulses. Show some restraint online. You can still be weird, just not mean. Stop punching down all the time.
Apologize publicly to Yoel Roth and firmly commit to supporting the gay community.
Install a new Twitter CEO and get back to being a full-time CEO at Tesla, or sell Twitter. Twitter is not equivalent to Tesla or SpaceX in terms of importance.
Until then, I’ll continue to drive my car because it’s a great product, and financially, it makes more sense to run it into the ground than trade it in for an inferior EV.
But now, when people who know I own a Tesla ask me what’s happening with Elon Musk, I just reply with a sigh:
“I don’t know. I miss the old Elon — the one that didn’t make me feel bad about driving my car.”