A week in tweets: Elon Musk keeps posting, but what is he saying?

myIon Musk hasn’t stopped tweeting. In just seven days last week, he made nearly 650 posts on the social network he bought in November 2022 and half-heartedly renamed X. He also spent nearly three hours struggling with technical issues he would later attribute to an unproven hacking attack so he could hold a “conversation” with Donald Trump, as well as live-streaming a couple of hours of Diablo IV, Blizzard’s sword-and-sorcery game.

The sheer volume of his content would be impressive on its own, but even for someone so addicted to posting that he spent more than the budget of the Manhattan Project to buy the site, Musk’s consistency is alarming.

During the week of tweets analysed by the Guardian, there was one 90-minute period (between 3am and 4.29am local time) when he posted nothing. In every other half-hour period, day or night, he sent at least one tweet. He posted at 4.41am on Saturday, 2.30pm on Wednesday and 11pm on six days out of seven.

That week, Musk’s longest non-tweeting period (with one other person, you might say it was “bedtime”) was just seven and a half hours, with a nap until 8.10am after a late-night posting session. His shortest night’s rest, on Saturday night, saw him go offline after retweeting a meme comparing London’s Metropolitan Police to the Nazi SS, before coming back online four and a half hours later to retweet a cryptocurrency influencer complaining about jail sentences for Britons who attend protests.

Wow, awake, great

Not all of Musk’s content on X is rich with subtext. The vast majority of his posts are simple, one- or two-word responses to fans, followers, and fellow travelers. “Awesome,” he responds to a construction influencer posting an AI-generated photo of herself, two minutes before replying “Awesome” to a photo montage of a Tesla Cybertruck driving around North America, a minute after replying “💯” to an AI-generated cartoon of himself pointing to a sign that reads, “On this platform, we love reviews.”

Sometimes, a one-word response has its pros and cons: Musk, who has never followed conventional “etiquette,” sometimes responds to a message with the “😂” emoji before copying it directly to his own wall without giving credit. It’s unclear why some get an appreciated retweet from Musk and others get their post stolen and republished.

Occasionally, Musk manages to be even more judicious in his praise, particularly from users he seems uncomfortable agreeing with too loudly. Posts from End Wokeness about an early release bill in California, from a far-right Malaysian influencer about a Haitian criminal, and from Libs of TikTok about another California bill all get a simple “!!” from Musk. Others don’t even get that: a post from far-right influencer Dom Lucre, whose suspension from the site for posting child abuse images, personally revoked In 2023, he received only a “!” from the billionaire.

Riots and Grok

Musk’s agitation over the UK riots appears to have deepened his association with the far right. Over the past week, he struck up a conversation with Canadian influencer Lauren Southern, one of three anti-Islam activists who were Banned from entering the UK by Theresa May’s government in 2018. As well as speaking out about their shared distrust of the media, Musk is now a paying subscriber to her feed, supporting her for £4.92 a month, as he does with more than 160 other users.

But there is a method to Musk’s apparent madness. Ever the showman, the memes and chats he retweets and reposts are littered with whatever he wants to promote that day. Sometimes, that’s a professional thing: On Wednesday and Thursday, after his artificial intelligence company, xAI, released the latest version of its Grok language model, a significant proportion of his posts shared quotes and images generated by it.

And then there are the riots. During the working week, Musk’s attention was diverted from the tension in the UK, but the constant drumbeat of sentences over the weekend meant he was ready to engage in mild popular unrest.

She latched on to the right-wing meme that Keir Starmer was promoting “two-tier” policing, constantly drawing attention to the punitive sentences handed down to rioters while downplaying their involvement in the violence. Early on Friday morning, she expanded her criticism of the SNP’s Humza Yousaf, calling Scotland’s former first minister “super-super racist” and challenging him to file a lawsuit in response.

Trump and Tesla

On Monday and Tuesday, Musk drew attention to his conversation with Donald Trump: He shared excited posts from fans in the run-up about how many people would likely tune in and what the two smartest men in the world would discuss, and then, after the livestream had ended, he reposted aggrieved complaints about how biased media wasn’t writing positive headlines and asked fans to boil the conversation down to a more manageable hour-long highlights reel.

Despite all the friction, another side of Musk comes to light when he talks about his two biggest companies, Tesla and SpaceX. In the case of Tesla, a publicly traded company, he has to be careful about what he says. Musk has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, as well as legal obligations about how he can disclose material information. This came to a head when the SEC sued him for a notorious tweet in which he falsely claimed he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. In the subsequent settlement with the regulator, Musk agreed to have a lawyer review all of his tweets about Tesla, an agreement he has since regretted.

However, even after appealing all the way to the Supreme Court, the deal still stands and Musk has one last chance to free himself from the Twitter caretaker. He was expelled in April of this year. And so his posts about Tesla are surprisingly measured: Shortly after his conversation with Trump, he even posted a lengthy, almost par for the course statement, retracting some of his comments about climate change. “To be clear, I believe global warming is real,” he said. He startedbefore explaining that all he had meant was that even without global warming, high levels of CO₂ They were dangerous.

‘The Guardian is rubbish…’

Musk also took the opportunity to attack another of his favorite targets: The Guardian. After the paper quoted experts calling it “the dumbest climate talk of all time,” Musk lashed out at other followers of his who shared the article, telling author Stephen King that The Guardian “cannot be considered objective” and businessman Vinod Khosla that “The Guardian is garbage.”