I must preface by admitting: ketamine is not a drug I've tried. Ever since finding out about Enumclaw's Hometown Hero as a child thanks to age-inappropriate family,* I've been a bit averse to horses and things intended to be put inside horses not humans. Seems like conservatives don't have the same response, given the horse dewormer they took for COVID and now the horse tranquilizers for Elon (and given his performance the last few days, maybe Donald's been snortin' up some tranqs, too).
I found one of my old cat's Onsior for an upset tummy after he got neutered, though, so I could play Cirrhosis Bingo and see how this one pans out. You know, for science.
Anyway, I digress as ever. What is relevant is that I lack experience with Special K (not just part of a healthy breakfast!) but in some senses, I've heard/seen it compared to other psychedelics. Ketamine is considered 'gentler' by some and the descriptions remind me a bit of hearing about taking an anti-anxiety pill like a benzo? The distorted sense of time perception seems to be the main overlap: hours can fly by and seconds can crawl through molasses. It's hard to really describe it beyond that because, like many drugs, experiences are heavily subjective.
Regardless, I don't know the validity of pointing to drug use as a catalyst for Musk's speedrun from nearly universal respect to moronic laughingstock—if anything, it's only accelerated the process of his carefully-manufactured PR mage crumbling.
Iconoclasm, unfortunately for him, can be an inevitable process of facts coming out, rather than the nefarious plotting of a group of conspirators. This latter thinking often dominates the minds of dictators—from Stalin to Hitler to Napoleon to... the list goes on—this paranoid thinking leads to a circular firing squad spurred by continued searching for infiltrators or spies.
Paranoid and paranoia are repeated themes throughout the book when it comes to Musk.
One example, the ramifications of which run throughout Character Limit: Musk kicked up a huge stink about how he didn't believe Twitter was doing a good job distinguishing between bot and real users. It was allegedly one of his big reasons for purchasing the company. No matter how many times he was shown data and walked through the process, Musk would not accept this answer. In fact, his paranoia went the opposite direction and he became convinced there were "ghost employees" who did not exist but were created just to cash extra paychecks.
After taking over, this whole security thing took a bizarre turn—remember the roll out of paid checkmarks instead of verifying 'Official' accounts?
Musk was shown some of the problems with his approach—illustrated by a demonstration showing how someone could pay a few bucks, pretend to be the President, and potentially cause a global incident by declaring nuclear war and being indistinguishable from the 'real' account.
Despite this, he decided "free speech" was more important (as is pointed out elsewhere in the book, the point is not speech, it is reach: you can go play at being Chicken Little at the local park and scream about the sky falling—but you shouldn't expect to be sat down to address the nation from behind the Resolute Desk or give next year's State of the Union. Similarly, you can go on Twitter and spread whatever bullshit and be ignored and have your content's audience shrink as a result—you shouldn't be able to pay less than $10 to play-act as POTUS and see if you get to be today's lucky winner of the "Global Incident Sweepstakes!").
We're seeing this right now, and we don't need hypotheticals about nuclear war. From pages 332-333, we read about a discussion regarding this whole situation on a much smaller, weather-based scale.
A Japanese employee uses a personal example to demonstrate the damage caused by misinformation: a storm had struck Japan and someone used AI to create a fake image and exaggerate the danger. The employee ends with a haunting remark about how much worse the damage could be if that was a verified account allowed to spread this misinformation.
Elon's answer?
"Safe to say we'd suspend that account. And we'll keep their eight bucks. It may not seem like much but people really don't like losing their eight dollars. So we'll see what happens there."
Well, we know now.
They say this guy's a tech and security genius, he's even got DoD contracts—and yet he thinks that a foreign adversary can't figure out how to create fake Twitter accounts "because they don't have the phones and cards," despite Russia buying $200k worth of Facebook ads to fuck with the 2016 election.
They say this guy's a financial genius—and yet he thinks $8 and hurt feelings are going to be enough for a foreign dictator like Putin (possibly the world's richest man) to say, "Well, sowing dissent in the US isn't worth it, guys, pack it up, we're shutting down the Internet Research Agency!"
I dunno, I'm no genius but even I get the feeling this guy's a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
On X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, misinformation has become disinformation at this point; this extends beyond 'possible ignorance' to 'this is active negligence at best, but more likely malicious intent or worse.'
Another interesting point of note comes when the authors note "something particularly human" about Elon, a man who typically comes across as erratic, egomaniacal, unpredictable, and loosely tethered to reality: "he could.be terrified into submission." Given the number of companies he has his fingers in, this makes him a massive security risk even as it opens the avenue to a solution.
In the above case, the dominoes that are ticked over and lead to him being overcome by his anxiety and depression are Twitter's large advertisers threatening to pull out massive amounts of revenue as a result of the botched execution. Instead of a geopolitical crisis, people just impersonated people and kicked up shit—a sports star had a fake story about being released from his contract, fake account posted as a pharmaceutical giant saying insulin is free, it was impacting markets and the like.
If advertisers pulled out, he'd risk insolvency. Risking insolvency would mean having to tap into Tesla or SpaceX money in massive droves. Massive offselling in those amounts is going to further destablize them and their stock prices to keep afloat Twitter, which is bleeding money still, but it's not the money being bled out of pockey—it's the magnified impact on Tesla—today, down from the upper-$300s a share to ~$220 a share. Multiply that by outstanding shares of the company. That's a lot of money and Elon's built a house of cards on foundations of sand.
This, at least would seem like a working thesis—right up until the closing pages of the book, when the Sorkin-Musk interview is covered—possibly more famously known as Elon, mad at being called out for spreading misinformation and furious Disney's CEO was wary about associating things like Snow White, Frozen, and Cinderella with swastikas and gas chambers, to "go fuck yourself."
He's erratic, dangerous, unpredictable, and belongs in a padded room. Talk about the epitome of privilege—South Africa's best was embodied by Mandela and its worst lives on in Musk.
There are times where through everything, one gets glimpses at a figure who, in a Citizen Kane sense, is chasing an imaginary Rosebud and this evokes some sympathy.
Well, up until looking at the actions he performs everyday, the awful path forward he presents, and the glee which he seems to take for in being as cruel and vindictive as possible to those who he views as having insulted him and hurt his thin skin. I can trace a Charles Foster Kane and get a glimpse behind the walls of his pleasure dome at Xanadu—but I can’t pull him back across the Senecan line and into palatable territory after reading about all the destruction and chaos and violence he’s sowed..
As the book says early, a place once called the "digital town square" has now become "Musk's mirror."
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*Fortunately, we can also tie horsies into this story in another way, namely, in the time Elon sexually harassed a flight attendant and offered her a horse in exchange. Watch out, 'Kars 4 Kids,' 'Handies for Horsies' is comin' in hot for 'Billionaires' Preferred Charities of 2024.'
—Another "fun" anecdote, to illustrate this genius businessman's acumen (this ties into his insistence that there's no need for security checks if someone pays for Twitter's premium service—relevant to the above section discussing paid marks vs. verified 'Official' accounts):
"What we'e doing here wih verified being attached to a credit card and a phone is the worst possible thing to do to bad state actors," [Musk] said, waving his hands like an orchestra conductor. "Not because they don't have the money. But because they don't have the phones and cards. That's what they don't have. You can't just produce.a million phones or cards a day." ...
"Governments are terrible at executions," Musk continued. "The government is the DMV. That's who we are fighting here." ...
In 2016, Russia's Internet Research Agency used credi cards to buy $200,000 of advertising on Facebook to sow social unrest in the US."
If I'm a foreign adversary, I'm not going to be deterred because 'no one likes losing their $8' I'm going to say, "This is less than, what, 1% of the cost of a bomb? Wow, that's a steal of a deal to sow discord."
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