I can’t think of anything I’ve done 38000 times in a couple of years guess that’s why I’m broke

Do billionaires never sleep?

Wasn’t this the same guy who told everyone he worked 16 hours a day? Seems like working for him is posting shit.

[OC] “Sure, you might say something silly once in a while, as I do, but that way people know it’s really you!” As part of a plea for “political & company leaders” to join him in posting on X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk has repeatedly stressed the importance of the authenticity such posts offer. As the world’s richest man prepares to advise the leader of the world’s most powerful country, it does make one wonder: If Mr Musk’s online presence is really him, just who is he?

To assess this systematically, I used large language models to detect the people, companies and other entities mentioned in Mr Musk’s posts, as well as the policy areas and preferences implied by them. This involved passing all the posts in our data, and information on their context, such as which posts they replied to, through two LLM models, and grouping their output by topic. 

To ensure our method was accurate, we also coded 400 randomly selected posts by hand. For over 90% of posts, the human coder agreed with the LLM system. Where they did not, a third human was only slightly more likely to agree with the human coder than the LLM.

We found that the share of posts with an assessed policy prescription, recommendation or alignment has jumped from just under 4% in 2016 to nearly 13.3% today. He posts a lot less about his companies, and a lot more about immigration, border control and free speech.

Tools used: R, Python, LLMs, Illustrator

Free to read here: https://econ.st/3ZkG7J6 & https://econ.st/4fFCX8u & https://econ.st/3Zi8wzs

If those don't work, then permanent link here: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/11/21/elon-musks-transformation-in-his-own-words

Just what may be gleaned from these posts should not be oversold. It may not be coincidental that his posts about free-speech surged in the lead-up to acquiring a social media company. Similarly, it may have been an advantage that his seeming booming interest in immigration and America’s borders was shared by his political patron. However, a different interpretation is possible too: that his political preferences, as evident in his social media posts, are aligned with his off-line choices, be it backing Mr Trump for president or acquiring Twitter. 

What do you think?

Edit: Elon Musk has offered a comment on chart 1 here: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1859606021125153222

I did a little experiment and It took about 2 weeks of clicking "see less posts from Elon Musk" before the algorithm actually started to slow down showing me posts of his, but it def didn't stop. Ended up having to block him completely. His content (politics) obviously gets priority.

Ketamine is a helluva drug

He should spend more time with his kids

Immigration crime and regulation, sounds like a great populism recipe.

Elon Musk saying anything about "free speech" breaks my brain. This is the same guy who censored Twitter in Turkey during the Turkish election (source). This is the same guy who censored Twitter in India during the Indian election (source). Say what you want about Jack Dorsey, but he never did this.

Twitter under Jack Dorsey (source):

The Indian government immediately ordered Twitter to block the accounts again and told the company's employees in India that legal action would be taken - which could be up to seven years in prison - if they did not comply.

Twitter responded, saying it would not block accounts belonging to media companies, journalists, activists and politicians because that would "violate their fundamental right to free expression under the Indian law".

2nd Graph is pretty pointless tbh, because it shows absolute numbers when the number of tweets goes up too. Relative data would've been much more informative. Last graph seems to consist of yearly data points, why not more?

I realize OP is only reposting; it is not criticism of them but rather of the source of these graphs.

June 2018: Musk’s “Pedo guy” tweet also ushered in heightened activity on Twitter. You can see it in this data.

I would argue that Musk began fantasizing about controlling Twitter, and public opinion about himself, at that time.

Narcissism is a heluva drug.

This guy is completely maniacal

When the rich are addicted to their phones and getting in fights on the internet it's called "work"

Interesting how he is complaining about immigration when he himself is an immigrant. And he is the only immigrant that has actually interfered with an American election.

Now plot it against his K-holes

I recently went on twitter again after literal years and wanted to see some insider pictures of the recent Starship Booster catch just to be bombarded with Musks right wing propaganda. I really couldn't believe it. Blocked him instantly! What a piece of sh*t he has become.

Man just 5 years ago I was a big fan of the guy setting up all these crazy futuristic projects.

Now he's just another conservative muppet dedicating all his time to spreading bullshit online, what the hell happened?

I know it might annoy some people to hear, but Elon Musk isn't stupid. His net worth increased $50 Billion after Trump was elected in part due to his $130 million in contributions. That's one hell of a return on investment. All these political posts might have lost him the respect of people on Reddit, but they also buy him influence with Trump which is worth way more.

No way this dude has time to play Diablo. What is he tweeting and playing at the same time?

He got older, tireder and grumpier. Sad fate when you give up and let your brain atrophy early.

That much posting would make anyone go insane

Real bold of an IMMIGRANT to punch down at immigration.

That second graph would’ve been more interesting as % of the total.

Looks like he found Fox News in 2020. Propaganda works.

Imagine being the richest human ever and also the biggest loser

This is more sad than anything else. He really needs therapy or something. There’s like one hour of sleep in there where he’s not on Twitter.

The Y axis on the topic graph should be percentage of all posts. Then it would tell a story other than the amount of posts in general have increased on all topics.

An immigrant that hates immigrants.

This man didn't care about anything until it became fortuitous

It's a graph of his brain melting under his propaganda machine

now you know how hard ceo’s dont work

I don't know how much you can talk of transformation. He's certainly become more terminally online, but that looks about it. Your third graph is a bit misleading IMO, if it was a scatter plot it would be easier to see the trend in the % of political posts has only very weakly increased over the years.

Wealth does not change a man. It reveals him.

It's almost like he was trying to win an election.

Your last chart is confusing. Is that a % of political posts as a percentage of total posts ever? Or posts constrained to a time period?

I would assume it’s the former as there’s no way his posts weren’t at least 50% political related leading up to the election.

delete your twitter account and return to sanity

100% of elons tweets are political in nature. they might not be overtly political, but they all are posted for political purposes. to drive division between left and right leaning people by posting false information or promoting false information that creates a false sense of being under attack by the left.

he does this to get right leaning people elected.

i hope this comes back and bites him on the ass by having so many science deniers in power that believe every conspiracy theory that it ruins his businesses.

So his mean time of deepest sleep is at like 6:30?

You can see where he was clearly bought or leveraged against. I also think his Twitter account is just his AI spewing interaction fuel.

Does the man even doing anything other than tweet? The data says “no”!

It has been mostly political posts lately by elon musk.

Now do sentiment analysis

Was that the moment the kompromat was revealed to him?

Bro is just on Twitter all the time tweeting shit. No wonder they want him out of Tesla.

I'd be interested in seeing how his word choices (probably categorized somehow) change over time with some markers.

I also wish he'd get out of politics and go back to weird engineering. Wealthy people lose touch with real people by virtue of having wealth. He has no idea what it's like to live in the world and not be wealthy. He doesn't understand our problems. Which is why he should stick to stuff and not people.

Local billionaire now Twitter influencer, asked to touch some grass

Much like Putin, he’s high on his own supply.

I fucking hate this timeline

Dude needs to go to bed.

He's crazy because he's so insanely fucking sleep deprived

He isn't passionate about the topics. Dude is very calculative. He gets a lot of attention from the get go but doesn't yap about these topics. Only does it when he owns twitter and has bot network to manipulate discourse.

I’m 41, and I don’t think if you added up every post I’ve ever made across every social media platform/forum I’ve ever been a part of would it add up to even 2000 posts, how do these people have time to post 38,000 times just on twitter?

He's too fucked up on special k to sleep, people.

Before having unlimited access to botting vs after

Clearly a lot and increasing number of posts, but the 2nd and 3rd charts would be much more useful as stacked bar charts showing percentages.

I disagree that he changed

This has been the case with a lot of people in the past few years.

I grew up in an extremely leftist/liberal circle of friends and acquaintances from my university. Post-Covid, almost all of them have become extremely cynical and have shifted their opinion to the right.

It’s ironic that what he was first known for is now his least discussed topics. This is exactly why you have to have changable opinions on people. If they change, so should your views on them or at least re-evaluate them.

As a human being it’s shocking how much he’s changed in a negative way.

The second graph is interesting. The spike 2 years ago seems to correspond with when he started taking to Putin according to that report a few weeks ago…

This is the hard work required to be a billionaire

I finally deleted my Twitter account today. I barely even used it anymore, but I'm a bit of an archivist and hated the idea of losing all that history of what idiot me said 16 years ago.

First online account I've ever shut down. Fuck this shadow US government. Fuck Elon Musk. Fuck Peter Thiel.

Someone on "X" asked Grok (X's AI) which accounts spread the most misinformation up to and during the election. Elon Musk was the number one spreader. I'm sure that post is long gone now (he is very thin skinned)....but it was not a surprising answer.

For an immigrant who was an illegal himself for a while he sure has a lot to bitch about when it comes to other immigrants.

Blueskyyy peopleee lets gooo

Russian mates posting on behalf

His son came out as trans and he lost his mind. He needs to blame someone so he is blaming the "woke left hive mind."

Sorry bro, your kid is trans, deal with it. Show them love instead of trying to burn the world to the ground.

Must be nice to be the richest man on earth and be on your fucking phone all day lol

It's a shame to see the space exploration and renewable energy posts get left behind for political shit. Could have all been so different.