Elon Musk is a wannabe Bond villain who needs his wings clipped

Or there’s Richard Linklater's advice in his 1991 film Slacker: “Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.”

In other words, get off Twitter.

Unfortunately for folk like me – most journalists, and other assorted damned souls trapped in the hell that’s become the online political-media bubble – such advice is beyond reach. We cannot escape Twitter. Nearly every journalist is contractually required to promote work online. Politicians feel obligated to communicate directly with constituents. As Mephistopheles told Doctor Faustus: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

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You try to have a laugh online amid the bloody-awfulness, but it’s never worth it. I’ve had to call the police over Twitter threats, one of which came literally very close to home. And I’m a white, straight, bloke. Women journalists get similar threats, plus sexual harassment. Then add in being black, Asian or LGBT. Politicians are ground down by life online. Just check Mhairi Black’s resignation letter.

I say this to get my defence in early, as I can predict the reaction to this column on Twitter from the legions of Elon Musk’s fanboys. Dare comment on the cesspool that’s Musk’s private Pandemonium (and I mean that in the Miltonian sense: Hell’s capital in Paradise Lost), and you’ll invariably be told, by complete strangers: ‘Quit crying, libtard, if you don’t like it, f**k off.’ If I’d a penny for every time I heard that, I’d have golden underpants.

It’s not that Musk turned Eden into the Colosseum. Twitter was always rancid. It’s that he took the Trainspotting toilet and led a mass dirty protest, so every headbanger on Earth could scrawl swastikas in their own filth. From what I can see, most days Twitter is basically a mass Nazi play-date.

So, I’ve been waiting – with little hope – for today to arrive. A Twitter rival is being launched, called Threads. It’s by Meta – the sleekit Facebook rebrand following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. See why I’m not optimistic? That’s how bad things are: folk hope Frankenstein’s Monster will save them from Dracula.

Remember: outside the political-media bubble, many depend on social media for friendship, connection. It should be a net positive in their lives, not something which brutalises them while they use it.

What compounds Twitter’s utter awfulness is that the platform is a fiasco. Musk casually – sneeringly – sacked so many staff, it’s simply a clunky mess. Pre-Musk at least hate came with functionality.

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But there’s one effluvia which crowns Twitter’s rottenness: Musk himself. Like Lucifer, he reigns in hell. He makes the world’s other appalling billionaires seem positively enlightened. This week, though, he sunk lower than his worst critics imagined possible.

In response to some random account, Musk basically backed enforced breeding. An anonymous weirdo tweeted: “Democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents. Helps solve the procreation problem too.”

To which Musk replied: “Yup.”

It’s cheering to know the man controlling the global town square fancies denying votes to the childless. Nothing scarily totalitarian about that.

Musk has monstrous form. He’s repeatedly amplified extremist conspiracies, even saying that revelations about the background of the neo-nazi gunman responsible for a mass shooting in Dallas were a ‘psy-op’. He’s a petty playground bully who called the British rescuer involved in helping Thai schoolboys trapped in a flooded cave a ‘pedo’. He promoted lies about the attack on the husband of US politician Nancy Pelosi. The Israeli government accused Musk of stoking antisemitism. He sucks up to communist China, while masquerading as a ‘free speech’ champion. He treats his workers like dirt. Understandably, advertisers fled Twitter.

These are just the edited highlights. It’s impossible to comprehensively list Musk’s egregious, petty, ugly, stupid, nasty, damaging behaviour in one column. One day a biographer will do his shoddy life justice but there simply isn’t space here. Thankful some areas of the internet remain uncontaminated by his ilk, so you can read authoritative accounts of his works at your leisure.

He’s a wannabe Bond villain who needs his wings severely clipped, and maybe the collapse of Twitter will provide the secateurs.

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Musk exemplifies the dire influence of ‘the billionaire class’ dominating global culture. They’re a breed, a species – what is the collective noun for billionaires? A fester, perhaps – who crave grovelling obeisance, endless approval, and weaponise online hate through their cultish acolytes without hesitation, regardless of consequence.

There are, according to Forbes magazine, 2640 billionaires on Earth. The global average income is less than £8000. How has a population of eight billion allowed a handful of people who care absolutely nothing for the lives of ordinary folk to wield such power?

The era we now live in makes the age of Victorian robber barons appear benign. The coal-men, oil-men, railway-tycoons, steel-magnets: they just controlled the ‘things’ humanity lived with, the physical accoutrements of human lives, which, clearly, is bad enough. But today, the Musks of this world – and the slighter lesser demons populating Facebook and Google – seek control over our thoughts and emotions.

Look around at the rubble of life in 2023: an economy that cuts your throat, a political world so broken it threatens to pull democracy under, a media landscape filled with hate and confusion. Ever wonder why? Life wasn’t perfect 10, 20, 30 years ago. But it broadly functioned. Today, we exist within a total systems failure. It’s no coincidence this slide into disintegration came as social media arrived.

We can’t turn social media off. Though, as Macbeth says, I wouldst thou couldst. But we can hope for Twitter’s imminent collapse; and we can hope its rival, Threads, has learned from the bluebird’s errors when it arrives on the scene today.

I doubt it, though. Omens aren’t good. Look at the name of this new Twitter rival, Threads: the same title as a movie about nuclear armageddon and a post-apocalyptic slide into fascism. Hardly promising.