It is wrong to enjoy the pain of others, unless that person is Elon Musk and the pain is about his purchase of Twitter. In an interview with the BBC reporter James Clayton this week, Musk enumerates the ways in which buying Twitter “hasn’t been some kind of party”, describes the thousands of lay-offs at the company as “not fun at all” and puts the pain level of the whole experience at “extremely high”. As interviews with CEOs go, these comments count as immensely revealing, although for me the real takeaway has been that you can be the second richest man in the world and still struggle to find dental veneers that fit.
Apologies; that was petty. But there is something about the ludicrousness of Musk that triggers the most childish responses. To watch Clayton grapple with him in the last-minute interview – Musk apparently gave the reporter a 20-minute heads up, not a controlling manoeuvre at all – is to witness an almost unmatchably awkward collision between reverence and contempt. The BBC, with its forelock-tugging “just happy to be here” energy (I don’t fault the reporter for this, by the way; there’s an argument that Clayton’s unthreatening demeanour extracted more from Musk than Emily Maitlis would have done), and Musk, working hard to get his reasonable-guy persona off the runway but coming across like a character from an Anthony Trollope novel.
It was all there: the weak chin, the bounce on the opening syllable of his words to telegraph sincerity and invite us to sympathise. Musk’s air in the interview was almost ecclesiastic in style, the measured tones of a man as much interested in the matters of the spirit as the material world. “I actually have a lot of respect for the BBC,” he said, as if announcing a wild eccentricity. Which, of course, for someone like Musk – hostile to critical media and indulging the low net worth individual before him as an emperor might indulge a scrofulous peasant – it is.
The bonhomie didn’t last. Musk’s veneer of bottomless civility wasn’t one he could keep up. And as the interview wore on, the thin skin of the tech billionaire became evident. On the subject of the thousands of Twitter employees Musk unceremoniously sacked after buying the company for $44bn last October, Clayton proffered, mildly, that “it felt a little bit uncaring”. Musk fidgeted in his seat and reached down for his water. He jabbed his finger at the reporter. “Let me ask you: what would you do?” The exchange had about it a Trump-like air of a man so sealed inside his own reality that the basic rules of interaction have to be explained. “Well,” replied the reporter, slowly, “you might want to give someone some notice.” “By the way,” he added, “I’m not running Twitter.”
What else did we learn from the interview? That Musk is a fan of the rhetorical question; of course he is, he would rather self-interview. “Have I shot myself in the foot multiple times? Yes. I think I should not tweet after 3am.” “Were there many mistakes made along the way? Of course.” And so on.
We learned that, like my eight-year-olds, when Musk gets animated he reaches for the word “literally”. In relation to the rise in toxic content on Twitter since Musk opened the door to users who were previously banned, he said: “Give me one example! You literally can’t name one. You literally said you experience more hateful content and then couldn’t name a single example, that’s absurd.” (Here’s one: the rise in accounts opened by Twitter LOLZ merchants the Islamic State in the days after Musk bought the company. And according to research by the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, there has been a general spike in hate speech on Twitter in the same period.)
It is scant compensation, and also, literally, an effort on my part to level the field between the billionaire and the rest of us, but we also caught a glimpse into the yawning chasm of Musk’s sense of humour. And were reminded that, money aside, there is nothing much there to envy. Last December, you may remember that Musk promised to honour a Twitter poll that voted for him to stand down as CEO. “I did stand down,” he said, when prompted by Clayton. “I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter.” Another in a long line of Musk’s comments that should have been saved to drafts for review.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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