He may have been racking up the hours at the office lately, but even Elon Musk knows when to take a break. The world’s second richest man was spotted in Qatar yesterday at the FIFA World Cup final between Argentina and France. What’s weird about a rich man going to a rich-person-thing, you ask? The fact that he was in the same box as Jared Kushner…
Watching Argentina beat France on penalties capped off a frenetic few days for the new Twitter chief. Earlier, he had kicked a number of tech and “disinformation” journalists off his app for supposed breaches of Twitter policy. The infractions supposedly included mentioning the existence of @ElonJet, an account that posted the location of Musk’s private jet, and linking out to profiles on other social media, such as Mastodon, Facebook and Instagram.
After the game, Musk tweeted out a poll asking his followers if they think he should step down as the head of Twitter. After 17.5 million accounts voted, the answer is a resounding yes, by a fourteen-point margin. Awkward.
Musk then got… deep. He tweeted “as the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.” It’s almost as if buying a failing company on a whim isn’t exactly a great idea. Especially when you fire half the workforce.
Can we take Musk at his word when he says he’ll step aside? Well, that’s a tricky one. Previously, he’s abided by the results of other Twitter poll decisions, such as reinstating former president Donald Trump and the journalists he kicked off after a hissy fit the other day. But then again, he also said he’d leave the ElonJet account on his site — and then banned it and threatened legal action against its owner, after saying that he didn’t like getting doxxed and that posting his jet’s location put his family’s safety at risk after an incident involving a possible stalker at a gas station in Pasadena this week. The Washington Post‘s Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz, both of whom Musk had booted off Twitter, reported that “police say they’ve yet to find a link between the confrontation and the jet-tracking account.”
Who could replace Elon at the top of the Twitter tree? Maybe Jared Kushner could be the man for the job. After all, he has time to spare lately after refusing any involvement with his father-in-law’s latest presidential campaign.
