Elon Musk, American Disruptor
The billionaire's Twitter takeover and subsequent media frenzy presents winning narrative Illinois politicians can adopt
I recently re-watched the movie “There Will Be Blood” over the winter. It’s a film starring Daniel Day Lewis who’s character, Daniel Plainview, builds an oil fortune in the early 20th century. The film is believed to be loosely based on the story of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and one of our country’s first entrepreneurs.
Rockefeller, who became the richest man in the world, was once asked by a reporter how much money was enough. He famously answered, “it’s always just a little more than you have.” In “There Will Be Blood,” Plainview says in a rare moment of candor, “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.”
On the backs of ruthlessly ambitious men such as Rockefeller – fictionalized through Plainview – is how modern American capitalism was born.
Monday’s announcement that Elon Musk had purchased Twitter dominates the news cycle thus far this week. When the sale completes, Musk will take the company private and said in a statement, “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
As Musk said in his statement about the social media platform, Twitter is a modern-day public town square, a central hub for discussion and dialogue of all material and subject matter, a nerve center where journalists share their reporting and one of the few places regular folks, by using their @ button, can interact directly with politicians, athletes and other celebrities. Musk regularly tweets to his 85 million followers, giving off an air of accessibility counter to other wealthy contemporaries like Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett (Bezos has a Twitter account but with less than 4 million followers. Buffett is not a tweeter).
Soon after the Monday’s news broke of his purchase, Musk tweeted out this populist statement:
Musk as Twitter benefactor is a win for free speech and capitalism. It’s also a win for for those who produce and consume media as this story is a rare one in that it’s category agnostic. It’s business meets technology meets politics meets culture with a little sports thrown in as takeovers can be framed as competitive contests with high stakes, involving well known players, ending in an unclouded result.
Musk won.
His opponents lost.
Corporate media prefers binary narratives. They don’t do nuance well. Musk’s takeover of Twitter is the perfect one-size-fits all story that can fit into any news block on any show, with endless talking points on protagonists, antagonists and subplots (will Musk re-instate Trump? Will Trump snub Musk’s invitation to return? Those with Derangement Syndrome couldn’t open phone app and hit send fast enough).
Like Rockefeller over a century ago, Musk’s global popularity can be explained by his actions as inventive disruptor.
He took on NASA and the floundering space industry and built faster rocket ships with his company, Space X. Gasoline-powered cars not getting it done? Musk flipped the automotive industry on its head when he transformed Tesla into a billion-dollar company. Now, with Twitter, he’s stirred the pot again. An immigrant from South Africa, Musk is arguably the most influential figure in our country right now.
As the calendar flips to May and closer to the primaries and general election season, there is no better time for a Musk equivalent to emerge in Illinois politics.
We have a clear antagonist establishment incumbent in Governor J.B. Pritzker (no one is more ‘establishment’ than Gov. Moot). There is a track record of villainous public health policy over a lengthy stretch of time. Illinois residents pay more in taxes than in almost every other state, compounded by an inflationary environment we haven’t seen in decades. Those two issues alone – executive power overreach (confirmed by the courts) and high taxes – make the political climate ripe for disruption and overturn.
The obvious fact that it’s easier for a billionaire to buy a public company than for a politician to turn a state upside-down (certainly one as machine-run as Illinois) shouldn’t matter. Political campaigns are about crafting a story, packaging and selling it to voters.
I wrote a few weeks ago how Illinois Republican candidates were missing a messaging opportunity when Musk was first reportedly joining the Twitter board of directors. Now that he actually owns Twitter, here lies another chance.
We are in a media environment where a billionaire entrepreneur dominates headlines. How so? Because he is shaking up a now-universal industry that is broken, that has lost trust of the American public for its inability to protect one of our most basic freedoms, that of speech. We as a country cannot thrive without a vigorous and unrestricted marketplace of ideas. Content neutrality within that marketplace is essential to democracy.
History has proven Americans will back the rebellious agitator, as long as the purpose of the fight aligns with their ideals.
From Rockefeller to Musk, success leaves clues.
For the disruptor candidate, winning often follows.
For story ideas, article comments/feedback, media inquiries and more, drop note to jon@jonjkerr.com, or @jonjkerr on Twitter.
Good write -up! We can dream, can't we?
Yes...and hope its more than just a dream.