Elon Musk—neither villain nor hero

It has been a month and a half since Elon Musk took over Twitter, and it would be an understatement to say that the eclectic billionaire’s leadership has produced a seismic reaction. He has made several important changes to the social media app, fired quite a few staff, and seen major defections from top management. Musk has also partnered with several journalists to reveal what was suspected by most conservatives: Twitter has been governed by a censorious left-wing team whose idea of content moderation seemed only to punish what they see as right-wing wrongthink.

Liberals have recoiled at Musk, ramping up their perennial pearl-clutching about the end of democracy, while conservatives have cheered his iconoclasm, finding in Musk a new ally in the battle against entrenched opposition in the leadership class of many of our institutions. Journalists have feverishly covered every single new development inside the tech giant, with an importance and depth that parallels war coverage.

So how should Christians think about the world’s richest (or second-richest) man? On one hand, we can be grateful for Musk blowing a breath of fresh air through the echo chamber of Twitter, bringing more transparency and balance to this powerful platform that influences so much of the news media narrative. On the other hand, we might caution ourselves against lionizing the billionaire as if he’s leading some new kind of Reformation. He’s not the Apostle Paul forging a new Roman Road of communication.

Let’s remember that Elon, while perhaps an ally to conservatives on some level, might have the brilliance of Solomon but also seems to have the lifestyle of Solomon, fathering multiple children with multiple women. And his fealty to China, due to multiple business interests, should also give us pause. Musk’s boldness in speaking out against left-wing shibboleths on gender issues and COVID overreach is not matched by similar candor toward the CCP.

That doesn’t necessarily make Elon Musk the villain that has been caricatured by the media and the left, but it also means Musk is far from a hero that Christians should be honoring as a talisman for cultural Christian renewal. Christians shouldn’t think of him as more a brother than our actual brothers in Christ, simply because he might agree with some of our hot takes.

His ownership of Twitter is no more significant than the ordinary work that ordinary Christians, with less money and less fame, do every week in their communities. The kingdom of God mostly moves forward, not necessarily by clever tweets, but through unseen faithfulness among Christians of whom the world is not worthy (Hebrews 11:38).

Furthermore, Christians should be wary of the way that this one social media app, founded less than 20 years ago, seems to occupy so much of our attention, as if civilization itself rises and falls on the breakroom conversations in one San Francisco-based company. Musk buying Twitter is neither the end of democracy, as some liberals seem to fear, nor the dawn of a third Great Awakening, as some conservatives seem to believe.

Some cold hard facts might give us a dose of reality: only 8 percent of social media users around the world use the platform and only 10 percent of those users create 92 percent of the tweets. Twitter may be influential among the leadership and media class, but in the lives of most people it is inconsequential. If like me, you are an active user, you are likely an outlier among your family, your fellow church members, and your friends. Whether Twitter survives another decade or is gone tomorrow, our lives will not change that dramatically.

That doesn’t mean the social media app is unimportant. For writers, leaders, and other communicators, Twitter is a helpful tool both to distribute and to read content. It’s a window into the worldview of influential people. Still, it would do us all good to take a deep breath and resist the temptation to assign to Twitter a significance it doesn’t deserve. And we should keep as our primary source of wisdom and knowledge the book that is untouched by cultural trends and eclectic entrepreneurs and keep as our hero the one whose kingdom endures forever.