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Elon Musk’s Texts Shatter the Myth of the Tech Genius

The world’s richest man has some embarrassing friends.

The Atlantic

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Many of the ideas coming from his peanut gallery were equally poor. Döpfner, who is in charge of numerous media companies, including Insider and Politico, offered to run Twitter for Musk but seemed woefully unprepared for the task. In a novel-length text, Döpfner laid out his “#Gameplan” for the company, which started with the line item: “1.),, Solve Free Speech.” He alluded to vague ideas such as making Twitter censorship resistant via a “decentralized infrastructure” and “open APIs.” He’s similarly nonspecific with his suggestion that Twitter have a “marketplace” of algorithms. “If you’re a snowflake and don’t want content that offends you pick another algorithm,” he wrote Musk.

At one point in early April, Musk appears infatuated with his own idea to replace Twitter with a blockchain-based payment-and-message system. In a string of texts to his brother, the entrepreneur Kimbal Musk, he manages to convince himself that the idea could be huge and a way to crush spam while preserving free speech. In this preposterous scenario, users would have to pay a fractional amount of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin to post or retweet. Roughly 10 days later, Musk sends a different text noting that “blockchain Twitter isn’t possible.”