The microblogging site implemented a stinking response to media requests.
Elon Musk is playing by his own rules.
The eccentric and charismatic businessman loves to challenge the conventions of business circles and markets.
Sometimes this cost him dearly.
Such is the case when he was fined $20 million in September 2018 and lost the title of Chairman of the Board of Directors of Tesla (TSLA) – Get a free reportAfter he tweeted that he would take the electric car maker private. He also indicated that he had secured financing for the deal.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) descended on him, reminding him to be very careful when publishing information that could affect the share price of a public company.
not traditional
Despite the fact that Musk paid a heavy price for not complying with this rule, the billionaire has not stopped mocking the Securities and Exchange Commission or getting involved in a new showdown with the federal agency.
This is what musk looks like. It’s funky. When it comes to conventions, he wants to undermine them, push boundaries if necessary, circumvent them and invent new ones.
While he shies away from labels, there is one that applies to him: the billionaire is unpredictable, provocative and loves to test other people’s limits. He loves to challenge the norm. He sees himself as the leader of the world he belongs to, and at the same time, he feels too old to be. So he thinks he can get away with almost anything.
One of his recent provocations is reserved for the media, when a question is asked or a comment is requested on a topic, article, or something that requires a response. There is no other large company in the world, and no other CEO will indulge this last whim.
As part of an article about a report that the billionaire had downgraded Twitter, TheStreet sent out a request for comment on the platform, inquiring whether this information was accurate. The general journalistic rule when writing an article is to reach the parties mentioned in it.
Within a minute of sending the request, TheStreet received a response that boiled down to an emoji. Poop emoji.
nothing else.
Special treatment for journalists
A few days ago, Musk warned that the poop emoji would be the automatic response anyone would receive when they wrote to an email address for Twitter media inquiries. At the time, the message sounded like some kind of joke. But the tech mogul has kept his promise.
“Press@twitter.com now automatically responds with a,” the billionaire announced on March 19.
Musk has a complicated relationship with the media, especially on the mainstream side. He criticizes them and thinks they have an agenda against him and only seek to write critical articles against him.
“Why is the ‘traditional’ media so relentless of hate? A real question,” he wrote in February 2022.
His criticism has only grown harsher since he acquired Twitter for $44 billion last year.
“While Twitter pursues the goal of raising the bar for citizen journalism, the media elite will try everything to prevent that from happening,” he lamented in November.
The media coverage of his early days as owner and chairman of Twitter didn’t sit well with him. He didn’t particularly appreciate the headlines about his layoffs and the chaos that followed. Musk also didn’t appreciate media reports of advertisers leaving after he relaxed hate content protections.
On November 27, 2022, he said: “For the American media to argue against freedom of speech in America – within the confines of the law – is an absolute travesty. Shame on them! Shame, shame, shame.”
He believes that Twitter has been invited to play the role of the media from now on, because, according to him, the media has become subject to power rather than being held accountable.
“There seems to be no absolute self-awareness among the old media that they are behaving like a group of NPC drones,” he wrote on March 20.
But at the same time, Musk who regularly brags about the fact that Tesla, his other company, doesn’t advertise, often gives interviews to the same media outlets whose credibility he deems non-existent.