Elon Musk’s Social Media Bubble Did Him No Favors

When all you hear is praise...

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Elon Musk’s Social Media Bubble Did Him No Favors

Was Elon Musk a victim of his own fan club? A Francis Fukuyama column I read yesterday sent me back to the New York Times feature that reconstructed the Twitter/X environment in which the billionaire lives. To do so, reporters created a new account and followed the same users that Musk sees in his feed, “including world leaders and business tycoons alongside conspiracy theorists and far-right influencers.” They then analyzed 175,000-odd individual posts to get a sense of what Musk actually sees when he looks at his pet social-media property.

The results? Not surprisingly, the review “revealed ample praise for Mr. Musk and his various priorities, mixed with a torrent of right-wing outrage over progressive politics.” Perhaps most significant for Musk’s performance on the political stage, the analysis also “highlights the ways that social networks can create information bubbles.”

Many people have observed that Musk is pretty damn bad at politics. He often appeared mystified that people would take issue with what DOGE was doing to our government and those who depend on it, and he completely failed to understand that making himself the center of attention during a judicial election in Wisconsin might backfire. He had problems with personal politics, too, as witnessed by clashes with cabinet members that degenerated into shouting — and possibly shoving — matches.

Part of the issue, of course, is that he’s never HAD to be good at politics before. He’s run his companies with relatively little interference, and his name has never appeared on a ballot in this country. As long as he stayed in his lane as a marketer, hype-man and company-builder, he could play to his strengths. But like many successful people, he fell for the idea that being good at one thing makes you good at other, unrelated things. And to someone who doesn’t understand it, politics may look easy. But political skills are usually learned through hard experience, and as Sam Rayburn said when LBJ once gushed over JFK’s Whiz Kids, “I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

For this reason alone, DOGE was likely destined to become a Dunning-Kruger brigade from the start. But I suspect that Musk’s information filter bubble played a big role in why he thought he COULD change the structure and direction of the U.S. government without breaking much of a sweat. When just about everything you see and read tells you how smart and wonderful you are, you’re likely being set up for a fall.

I’m reminded of Peter Biskind’s book on the New Hollywood generation of the late ’60s and ’70s, particularly the film directors he profiles in harsh detail. Again and again, they ditched their first wives when their films brought in big money and bigger acclaim, and again and again, they didn’t direct another good movie for years (or in the case of George Lucas, ever). The wives who had known them BEFORE they made it big could tell them when they were wrong, but after these women were gone, the men often had no one in their lives who could call them on their bullsh*t. Star directors created real-life filter bubbles for themselves, and it did them no good.

Likewise, Musk has created an information environment for himself where he rarely encounters criticism and where even his worst business ideas land on sympathetic ears. Of course, I’m sure Musk has to use other channels beyond just Twitter/X at times, but I suspect he would also wrap himself with fans in those spaces as well. With tech oligarchs already embracing a worldview that sees the billions of other humans on this planet as lesser beings, saturating your social-media feed with sycophants is only going to reinforce your sense of exceptionalism.

And then you go into politics, where other people (literally) get a vote. Some outsiders have entered the political world and done well; others (think Schwarzenegger in California) have discovered that achieving anything in politics is a whole lot harder than they imagined. If newcomers can open themselves up to constructive criticism and put time into learning how to bring people on board, they have a much better chance of succeeding. But when you live in a bubble, no one is pushing you to change. And that, I suspect, is a big reason for Musk’s downfall.

Will we see a similar effect on a larger scale with Donald Trump himself? In his second term, he’s surrounded himself with True Believers who do not question his whims and desires, however corrosive to democracy they may be, and he routinely dismisses critics as crazy or communist. Musk’s reckoning came quickly, but he also flew very close to the sun (and the ketamine) very fast. Will Trump’s information bubble help lead him to failure as well? If so, it’ll take a while, and he may take the rest of us with him. Unfortunately, no post on social media can ease the sting of national collapse.

– cpd