Voices: Elon doesn’t get it – embarrassing tweets are the backbone of Twitter

In between all the controversies and politics and doxing and hate crimes, it’s easy to forget that Twitter was originally created for one purpose and one purpose only: impulsively saying the stupidest thing you can think of, and then regretting it immediately.

If anybody understands that, you’d think it would the site’s owner Elon Musk, who has made such a habit of showing himself up on the platform that people routinely forget that he was originally famous for being one of the richest people in the world.

However, that doesn’t actually seem to be the case, as in a recent interview with the BBC, Musk addressed his penchant for embarrassing himself 24/7. When asked about his controversial tweets, Musk said: "Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times? Yes … I think I should not tweet after 3am.”

Elon, you doofus, you rube; people should only be allowed to post on Twitter at 3am. You should have to take some kind of reverse breathalyser test to make sure you’re at least three beers deep before you’re allowed to tweet anything.

How does a man spend $40 billion on a website when he clearly misunderstands it so fundamentally? Twitter exists to humble the richest and most famous among us. It isn’t there to make money; it’s to remind us that the TV people are as flawed and human as the rest of us.

Do you guys remember in 2014, when Rita Ora tweeted “Dropping my new song Monday if this gets 100,000 retweets", and it got less than 2,000? So then she deleted the original tweet, and wrote "By the way my Twitter got hacked somebody is threatening to release new music I’ve worked really hard on. Nothing comes out until I’m ready”? I genuinely can’t think of anything funnier than that. The hubris of tying your self-worth as an artist to something that is so unlikely to happen, and then walking it back with an obvious lie? I know this word is overused, but that is iconic.

You don’t even have to write anything to reach impossible heights of Twitter failure. Who could possibly forget in 2017, when the official account of US senator Ted Cruz “liked” a tweet by an account called “Sexuall Posts” (sic) on the anniversary of 9/11? Cruz later clarified that somebody with access to the account must have accidentally liked the post, and for legal purposes I’m sure that’s exactly what happened! I would never imply otherwise! 9/11 was hard on all of us, Ted.

Donald Trump did some pretty bad stuff as president, I’ll begrudgingly admit. But you can’t deny that the man understood how to post on Twitter. From the bombastic grandeur of telling North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that Trump’s nuclear button was “much bigger” than his, to the blunt, subtle genius of “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke”, what Trump lacked in morality and leadership he more than made up for in sheer posting excellence.

While many of his tweets were deliberate and not at all embarrassing by Trump’s standards (you have to be able to feel shame to be embarrassed, after all), I don’t think we’ll ever have a better day on Twitter than in 2017, when he tweeted the single nonsense word “covfefe” and left it up for several hours with no explanation. I’m not saying the presidency was worth it just for that one tweet, but I’m also not not saying that.

Sure, they’re not all winners. It’s hard to laugh at some of Kanye West’s best tweets ("I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle” is a banger) when you see some of his more recent work. Nicki Minaj’s tweet about how the Covid vaccine made her cousin’s friend’s balls swell up was Hall of Fame-worthy, but the shine is taken off it a little when you remember that she was spreading medical misinformation at the height of the pandemic. We all used to laugh at Britney Spears’ bizarre tweets, until we later realised that they were likely the product of some pretty severe emotional turbulence.

Personally, I tend to panic-delete tweets about 15 minutes after I post them, because I’m a coward. Who knows how many viral sensations have been lost in time, like tears in rain? But for me, that’s probably the optimal way to post on Twitter: impulsively, with no thought to one’s reputation, followed by an immediate sense of overwhelming regret.

Twitter is the great leveller. It reminds us that our gods are but men, and that men can bleed. We need it to keep people like Musk humble, as they expose themselves as equal parts weird and terrible to millions of people with the click of a button.

After all, if we didn’t have Elon Musk’s 3am tweets, we’d probably still think he was really cool. He’d be able to retain his mystique, convince us he’s some kind of genius, and we’d probably keep putting him in Iron Man sequels. In many ways, Musk paid the GDP of a small nation to tell us that he’s a 51-year-old 4channer who still thinks memes from 2010 are funny. And if that isn’t the point of Twitter, I don’t know what is.