Social media platforms are devised by a Californian tech scene committed to competition and social hierarchy. Twitter’s protocols treat us as wannabe celebrities, striving to produce storms of admiration and rage. It is a complex evolutionary system that selects the vacuous grandstanding and sniggering boorishness of adolescent personalities… So much the better if, like Musk, they have a record of sociopathic behavior… What Twitter has done is (to) automate this tendency… A public sphere dominated by this lurid publicity mechanism is structurally committed to stupidity. And in that world, Musk is king… users are not citizens of a representative democracy, but lab rats governed by incentives and controls: Musk is simply the first such rodent to take over the laboratory.

No plutocrat has ever so drastically de-sublimated his own mystique as has Musk, merely by tweeting his thoughts into the eternal void. His online persona -variously dull, boorish, self-pitying, whimsical and exuberantly vainglorious – has an ambiguous impact on a credulous business and tech culture: on the one hand, his armies of online sycophants defend everything he says; on the other, he just doesn’t cut the figure of a genius.