Our analysis of 38,000 posts on X reveal a changed man
“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 holding forth on X, his social network, Elon Musk has repeatedly stressed that such posts offer an unusual and engaging authenticity. We have taken him at his word. What do his tweets say about him?
To work out what subjects preoccupy Mr Musk and how his views have changed over time, The Economist analysed his activity on Twitter (as it was) and X (as it became in 2023). Using artificial intelligence to trawl through his 38,358 posts between December 2013 and November 2024, we found that he is posting far more often and with a far more political bent. Climate change and clean energy used to be the realm of policy on which he opined the most, but he now bangs on much more about immigration and free speech (see chart 1).
Mr Musk posts vastly more than he used to. From December 2013 to the middle of 2018, he tweeted just over a dozen times a week, on average. Between then and October 27th 2022, when he completed the purchase of X, he was posting 50 times a week. Since the takeover, that has risen to around 220 a week.
Those who follow him—and over 200m do—may also have noticed a shift in subject-matter. From 2016 to 2021 between 30% and 50% of his tweets each year were about Tesla or SpaceX, his two biggest companies. These days only 11% are. Meanwhile the share of his posts that are political has risen from less than 4% in 2016 to over 13% this year (see chart 2).
The shift in the topics of such posts is even more dramatic. In 2022, as he was buying Twitter, posts about free speech surged. This was followed by a leap in 2023 and 2024 in talk of immigration, border control, the integrity of elections and the “woke mind virus”. (The vicissitudes of poor regulation has remained a common topic throughout.)
Despite his considerable business interests outside America, few posts mention other countries. Between 2017 and 2020 around 1% touched on China, but often in passing (“China & Japan have awesome trains…”) or to praise Tesla’s unit there. His interest in the country has since waned. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr Musk showed little interest in either country, but in 2022 they featured in almost 3% of his tweets. The only other country to crop up in more than 1% of his posts in recent years is Brazil, after the country briefly blocked X in August this year.
To his followers Mr Musk advocates a fierce focus on missions he sees as urgent, such as making humans an “interplanetary species” by colonising Mars. But his own posts reveal shifting interests over the past few years, with the only truly intense focus on the act of posting itself. He may have more money than anyone else on Earth and the ear of the next president, but to a casual observer, he may not seem that different from any other American man in his 50s: lurching rightward politically, online a huge share of the time, complaining about immigration and mocking the left.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Poster boy” (Nov 21st 2024)
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