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You’ve likely seen a lot of write-ups about Elon Musk having a temper tantrum last night and banning a group of journalists. It’s gotten a lot of attention in part because he banned ones that were in some sense covering him and his acquisition of Twitter, and because he banned reporters from some of the most prominent news organizations in the country, including CNN, the Times and the Post. In most cases (it’s hard to know because there’s been no clear explanation of why any of this happened) the bans were based on tortured readings of a new rule Twitter put in place the night before based on a different temper tantrum on Wednesday. Perhaps fittingly enough for a neo-Gilded Age tale, the episode starts with Musk’s private jet, a 2015 Gulfstream G650.
The whereabouts of every aircraft is public knowledge. You may have come across this if you’re checking the status of a friend or loved one’s flight. You type in the flight number to one of countless apps and you can watch the little plane icon as it makes its way from its take off to its destination. It’s the same with private jets. If you know the craft’s registration number you can track it.
A couple years ago a kid named Jack Sweeney started setting up bots — automated Twitter accounts to track various famous people and oligarchs as they transited around the world. Again, this is all publicly available information. You could look it up yourself. It’s just that Sweeney set up Twitter accounts that would update you automatically. Where’s Drake? Where’s Marc Cuban? Where’s Donald Trump? Where’s Elon Musk? Sweeney, now a college student in Florida, got renewed attention earlier this year when he set up an account which tracked the travels of 30 top-tier Russian oligarchs.
It’s important to note what this information is and what it isn’t. If Drake flies from New York’s JFK to LAX, that’s really all the information you get. Flight speed too, maybe. The time he touches down in LA. But that’s it. Apparently this has annoyed Elon Musk for a very long time. Indeed, early in his reign at Twitter he boasted that he believed in free speech so much he wouldn’t even ban the @ElonJet account even though as owner he now could do so any time he chose.
On Wednesday something happened. According to Musk, someone followed one of his cars that had one of his children in it and eventually banged on the car’s hood or jumped on the car’s hood. It’s unclear what part of this story if any is true. There appears to be no police report about the incident, which Musk characterized as an attack. But let’s assume for the moment that something did happen. Musk decided that the attack was based on the tracking provided by the @ElonJet account.
This, to put it mildly, is pretty hard to believe. If you’ve ever flown into Los Angeles, you know that LAX is basically a small city. There’s virtually no way you could take the information that Musk’s jet landed at LAX at 8:20 p.m. and use that information and match that to one of the thousands or tens of thousands of cars transiting in and out of the airport every night. It’s ludicrous. Musk has grandly termed these “assassination coordinates” and declared he will have zero tolerance for anyone threatening his family. But again, this is absurd.
To the extent you might imagine some super high-end plot that really could track Musk or his family from the plane through the airport, to a car, etc., remember, you can just go to one of several websites, type in the plane’s call letters and you get the exact information. In fact, slightly more information. The point is that while I’m sure this is annoying for the people in the private jet class, it’s doesn’t meaningfully endanger anyone. But for whatever reason Musk banned the @ElonJet account and hastily rewrote the site’s terms of service to ban any reporting of someone’s real time whereabouts without their permission — a hopelessly broad rule that any number of totally benign actions would violate.
That was Wednesday night’s tantrum. Now on to Thursday night’s. Over a period of a couple hours, more than a half dozen high-profile journalists had their accounts permanently banned. Twitter hasn’t said officially why these bans happened. But piecing the timelines together it appears each was tied either to raising questions about Musk’s “attack” story or linking to other platforms where the ElonJet account still exists — Facebook, the Twitter rival Mastodon, etc. Indeed, Twitter appears now to have listed the entirety of the Mastodon ecosystem as “unsafe” based on this. So if you click on a Mastodon account you get one of those “This is an unsafe site. Are you sure you want to proceed?” messages.
(Mastodon isn’t a company or a site, per se. It’s a distributed group of servers operating under a common protocol, somewhat like the core internet itself. Point being, there’s no authoritative figure or owner making policy for it in the way Twitter does.)
So to collapse this down to essentials, the journalists in question were, in some cases, banned for linking to other platforms like Facebook or Mastodon where the ElonJet account still exists and which, if you went to those platforms, you could still see updates on when Musk flies from San Francisco to Austin. So very indirect pointers to the same safety-irrelevant information. In other cases, they appear to have been banned for noting that the LAPD says they have no report of any attack like Musk described.
As you can see, the entire drama is a sort of perfect tableau of early 21st century neo-Gilded Age inequality drama. I’m tempted to say class war. But the whole thing is simply too silly to merit that. Likely nothing captures the vast gulf separating ordinary mortals who transit our separate corners of the globe in cramped planes, trains and automobiles and those who do so on private jets. The story does capture one key dimension of neo-Gilded Age life: the degree to which billionaires and plutocrats argue that their very wealth and power and all the static it generates requires or entitles them to even more protections and privacy. One example of this is the increasing demand for anonymity for donors who gives hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to candidates and campaigns on the argument that, without that anonymity, they’ll be targeted. In other words, their very heft and power entitles them to special levels of protection.
We shouldn’t imagine that Sweeney is some kind of transparency crusader or that Musk is the only billionaire who gets annoyed by this. Sweeney reportedly agreed to take down his Mark Cuban Twitter account in exchange for Cuban offering him ongoing career advice. Musk revealed that a year ago he offered Sweeney $5000 to take down @ElonJet. Sweeney countered that he’d take $50,000 and an internship. Musk told him to go jump in a lake. As I said, a perfect tableau of our age.
People are perhaps understandably up in arms about last night’s drama as an attack on free press, an example of the dangers of allowing a a manic buffoon like Elon Musk to own a critical piece of information architecture. I continue to see it a bit differently. All the social networks that hit the big time try to present themselves as the functional public squares of our age. The smart ones even set up quasi-governmental apparatuses to give some legitimacy to this conceit. The business advantages of doing so are obvious and vast. But of course they are not public squares. They’re private companies operated at a profit and in some cases according to the private whims and manias of their owners. Our guidestar should be resisting every move to present themselves as essential public squares.
As it happens, I think it all ends badly for Twitter. Its vitality and centrality rest heavily on the presence of journalists and other information influencers. Chase them off and you have what’s become of Facebook, still until recently at least a highly profitable company but no longer central to the flow or news and information. Journalists and other information influencers left and the charge left as well. Facebook at least was highly profitable, and continued to be, based on your parents and grandparents spending time there, until Apple changed its privacy rules. Twitter has never been a profitable company.
