Elon Musk's Perfect Disinformation Machine

At a moment of dangerously splintering reality, the billionaire manchild has engineered his most revolutionary invention yet: the perfect mechanism to turn money into lies and lies into money.

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Elon Musk, billionaire manchild and lifelong beneficiary of the Myth of the Secret Genius, is a serial embellisher. While his ambitious vision (along with the scientists and engineers who carry out the work for his companies) has transformed space exploration and electric vehicles, he is convinced that every new product emanating directly from his overconfident brainbox is a revolution.

Whether it’s the weird boxy deathtrap on wheels that steels insecure men from their midlife crisis by conquering rugged terrain (yet cannot withstand a journey through a vigorous carwash); or his long awaited futuristic underground Vegas transport fever dream that turns out to just be—gasp!—a car tunnel with colored lights, the ideas and products that Musk directly manages are often over-hyped.

Until now.

Even his most ardent critics must admit that Musk has, in at least one realm, lived up to his reputation as a path-breaking innovator. He has revolutionized an industry, constructing something so flawlessly designed to fulfill its purpose that one can only marvel at a rare, bona fide specimen of ruthlessly destructive genius.

For, you see, Musk has invented the world’s first Perfect Disinformation Machine.

It works like this: in one end, you stick in $44,000,000,000. The Machine slurps that cash up, sputters to life, and it begins. A slow burning fire ignites, relentlessly incinerating most of that cash. As the money disappears, out the other end shoots a dystopian firehose of conspiracy theories and lies, knocking reality-based sense out of Americans until they are eagerly making egregiously foolish, catastrophic decisions, all while turning millions of brains to mush.

Once sufficient gobs of neural matter have degenerated into an unfortunate wet ooze, the most spectacular David Attenborough-worthy display will inevitably follow. Millions upon millions of Muskian keyboard warriors who have been drawn into the machine will begin to proudly define themselves as independent thinkers. To showcase their independent critical thought, they will, in seemingly coordinated unison, howl their shared, newfound battle cry into the digital ether whenever they encounter a bigoted viewpoint: “FREE SPEECH!”

But this is not a story of ridicule. Instead, it is a story of high-stakes political devastation. Hidden changes are warping the already broken ecosystem that determines how many citizens—particularly in America—construct their sense of reality. The Machine is now approaching new and dangerous frontiers. And eventually, whether imminently or in the not-so-distant future, Musk’s powerful information weapon is going to cause major harm to us all.

I: Putting a Premium on a Hurricane of Lies

If you have had the wisdom and good fortune to avoid Twitter since the Muskian takeover, I salute you!¹ You have successfully shielded yourself from an increasingly deranged information feed, laced not just with many of the stupidest and most offensive opinions on the planet, but also involuntary exposure to blue-checked swarms posting snuff videos of people dying, while continually being accosted by pornographic hucksters who believe that the correct response to every electrochemical stimulation of their neurons is to offer an unsolicited photo of their scantily clad posterior while typing L I N K i n B I O. Oh, and there are Nazis. Lots of them.

It is a cesspit, it’s getting worse, and the accelerant is none other than Musk himself.

A few days ago, a largely invisible change was announced to the inner workings of his Perfect Disinformation Machine. By November, money would be allocated even more on the basis of polarizing sensationalism. The payment model offered to those in humanity’s saddest tribe—those who proudly label themselves with that most dystopian moniker of “content creators”—would now reward accounts who generate the most engagement among premium users of Twitter. It’s official: to the outlandish liars will go the spoils!

But it’s worse than that. The metric used for payment isn’t just who can attract eyeballs, as is currently the policy. Instead, it’s whether you can attract a certain variety of eyeballs, and those eyeballs, alas, are robustly attached to a particularly deranged set of heads.

Twitter’s premium users are not a group of ordinary people.² Instead, they are the byproduct of what a card-carrying social scientist like myself might call self-selection bias. Those willing to pay hard-earned cash on a monthly basis to one of the world’s richest men—all to generate more visibility within a digital ecosystem that increasingly panders to conspiracy theorists, sensationalist provocateurs, and right-wing racists—are not a representative slice of humanity.

Being a paid-up member of Twitter’s premium club functions as an honest signal, a relatively reliable social cue that the user is disproportionately likely to be a Muskian disciple.³ Moreover, there seems to be a skew within this group toward those with a self-proclaimed proclivity to just ask questions. Those just ask questions types, unfortunately, seem to have a disturbing tendency to allow their apparently curious minds to drift toward matters such as how to rank IQ by race? or to ponder whether the world might be improved without a certain group of people?, all while lamenting the endless oppression inflicted upon them by that most historically tyrannical and abusive half of the human species: women.

Now, if you, dear Twitter user, can successfully entice those kinds of people to engage with your little posts, then Elon Musk’s Perfect Disinformation Machine will whir to life and spit some unknown number of dollars directly into your bank account (or, more likely with this digital tribe, your crypto wallet).⁴

Unfortunately, humanity has been cursed with brains instinctively tantalized by secret narratives, hidden stories, and grand conspiracies. And the Muskian Machine, which was programmed to treat objective truth as a pointless and alien concept, is therefore a highly effective, dressed-up Pavlovian device. Except this time, it’s not bells that make dogs salivate, but cash payments that make zealots and crackpots and chaos agents lick their lips as they contemplate ever more destructive ways to capture the gaze of those money-making eyeballs.  

These design features underscore a grotesque fact: one of the world’s richest men recently doled out juicy financial rewards to some of the worst people on the planet as they cashed in by spreading lunatic lies during a deadly hurricane.

For example, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweet claiming that “they” control the weather—insinuating that some shadowy force deliberately conjured up a hurricane to steal the presidential election—was viewed by roughly 50 million people. Similar claims went viral, inevitably producing cash rewards. Worse, Twitter lies aimed at discrediting the federal government’s emergency response efforts through FEMA led to the depressing situation wherein those tasked with helping the hurricane victims had to re-deploy because of reports that armed militias were starting to hunt federal government employees. And the people who invented those lies got paid by the machine designed by Elon Musk.

Musk lamentably spends so much time in his own Machine that he’s radicalizing himself. Not only did he promote the monstrous lie that Paul Pelosi had his skull bashed in by a gay lover rather than by a deranged MAGA zealot, but he has clearly become the most influential disinformation vector in the world.

Musk has posted that “the Dems want to take your kids” and suggested it was suspicious that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”. He regularly interacts with some of the internet’s most vile influencers, including Pizzagate’s Jack Posobiec (who recently wrote a book suggesting that progressives are subhumans). And Musk recently promoted a show in which Tucker Carlson interviewed a Holocaust revisionist historian who claims that Hitler is unfairly criticized.

Alas, it’s only getting worse.

To understand the threat we’re facing, though, we need to return first to the past, and gaze into the world of the predecessors to Musk’s modern contraption, those imperfect disinformation machines that previously spread mass delusions with far less destructive power.

II: From Bat-Men on the Moon to the American Troll

In 1835, America buzzed with news of an astonishing revelation: not only were aliens real but they were our nearest space neighbors.

According to a series of reports, a new telescope had been invented, allowing human eyes to see that which had eluded Galileo: visible proof of a menagerie of life on the moon. And that array of life was complete with “miniature bison and beavers that stood on two legs.” (The bipedal beavers, it soon was surmised, had conquered fire, as it was reported that their dwellings appeared to be ringed with smoke from their moon chimneys).

It may safely be assumed that alien beavers can titillate, but readers yearned for something a bit more familiar. Soon, they got what they craved: confirmation of a human-like species gallivanting, with bat-like wings, above the lunar surface.

The bewildering moment of discovery was described thus: “We could then perceive that they possessed wings of great expansion, and were similar in structure to this of the bat, being a semi-transparent membrane expanded in curvilineal divisions by means of straight radii, united at the back by the dorsal integuments.” These strange creatures apparently weren’t shy; they were reported to enthusiastically mate in public, presumably quite a sight to observe from down below on the prudish Earth. This new lunar cousin species was dubbed Vespertilio-homo, the man-bat.

These breathless dispatches, masterminded by one Richard Adams Locke—a century-removed descendant of the great philosopher John Locke—were published in The New York Sun. The Sun had been established two years earlier, part of the penny press craze that acted as an insurgent challenger to more traditional forms of newspapers, which cost six cents. The Sun had modest income to show for its reporting—a somewhat failed insurgency. Enter Richard Adams Locke and his 17,000 words of lies, stretched out over six days of vivid “reporting.”

Locke’s claims may not have had the desirable quality of being rooted in reality or truth, but he was just asking questions. And, like his modern-day counterparts, one of those questions was this: are there different races of man-bat on the moon, and if so, are certain kinds better than others? The answers, which Locke supplied, were a resounding yes on both counts. He wrote of another species of man-bats that were “less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race.”

New Yorkers flocked to buy copies of the Sun, the “steam press worked around the clock to meet demand,” and within a few days, that penny press was the top-selling newspaper in the world. (The New York Times, racing to catch-up to the sensation, noted that the stories out of the Sun were “probable and possible”).

Locke’s motivations were purer than the keyboard edgelords that populate today’s increasingly dark corners of social media; he aimed at clever satire and missed, accidentally disseminating a believable hoax that hoodwinked millions. But, crucially, it’s unlikely that the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 did much harm; no natural disaster victims were deceived to their deaths, no atomic bombs were unleashed, no democracies died. It was a money-making lie—no more, no less.

Over time, newspapers developed firmer guardrails. The hoax mania of the 19th and early 20th century “reporting” gave way to ethical standards, fact-checking, due diligence, and an industry where, for the most part, outright, deliberate fabrications offered a one-way ticket out of the profession. The press has never been perfect, but better norms prevailed. Profit lurked ever in the background, but often alongside countervailing concerns about truth and the public interest.

Nonetheless, the money-making feature of information sensationalism never fully disappeared. And these days, the modern reincarnation of Richard Adams Locke isn’t terribly difficult to imagine, for a rather precise reason: I’ve met him. His name is Christopher Blair.⁵

Blair, a 6’3” behemoth of a goateed man, shook my hand while wearing a goat-laden T-shirt that said “Greatest of All Trolls,” riffing off the GOAT meme (usually referring to the “Greatest of All Time”).

“I was in construction for twenty-something years,” he told me, as we spoke in the parking lot of a Starbucks in rural Maine. “I was a victim of the [2008] crash…I was one of those people that lost everything.” But like every good American story, this one takes off not just from adversity, but from an innovative response to it. Blair knew he was a good writer, he had extra time on his hands, and so he decided to use his keyboard talents to make some money. He started a blog, an innocent gateway drug to his future lies.

If engagement measured by eyeballs and clicks is the currency of the internet, Blair soon realized that fake news was the easiest pathway to a lucrative payday in the run-up to the 2016 election. And even though he was left-wing, he realized that it would be most fun for him to write stories that lied about his own political side—as a subversive mechanism to ridicule conspiracy theories on the right.

“The first story that I wrote that went viral was ‘Hillary caught on a hot mic making racial slurs about Beyonce.’ I put it on the page and it immediately just went crazy, which was when I said to myself, that's insane. I'm going to need to do a satire disclaimer.”

Blair had a eureka moment: people will fall for anything and lies spread like wildfire. “I personally thought the story was hilarious. It was so far from reality. There was no recording of this actually happening. There was no corroboration anywhere. All the links [in the article] went to pictures of cats…It was just as dumb as can be. And next thing, I mean, it got a million page views.”

So, huffing far beyond the gateway drug of blogging, Blair began to write political bait, outlandish fake stories that would entice Republicans to click. And like Locke before him, he saw his work as a noble form of satire: he would wait until conservatives would share his ridiculous, absurd lies and then call them out on it on Facebook, hoping that the social ridicule of exposing their gullible fallibility might make them more careful with what they’d share the next time around.   

Here are some of the fake news stories Blair has written or published: “BREAKING: Clinton Foundation ship seized at port of Baltimore carrying drugs, guns and sex slaves.” “BREAKING: Torture chamber in Bill Clinton’s basement described as a ‘kill room.’”; and “Satanic Bible of death row inmate contained Barack Obama’s signature.” None of those headlines is remotely true, but that didn’t stop countless people from clicking, then sharing it on social media.

Well-intentioned satire or not, Blair’s writing did deceive large numbers of people (and he’s still at it). Perhaps he’s exposing hyper-gullible confirmation bias, but Blair is also constructing a false reality that influences vote choice. That’s a dangerous shift from the 1835 man-bats on the moon. Lies about lunar beavers don’t tend to sway elections.

But Blair is now the less worrying tip of a much larger iceberg. And with the ever-accelerating pace of disinformation within a fragile, hyper-connected world, politicized lies and conspiracy theories have become far more consequential and dangerous than ever before. (Several years ago, Pakistan’s defense minister was duped by a fake news story on Twitter and threatened to nuke Israel as a result; it isn’t hard to imagine things going very wrong in the future).

During this moment of degrading democracy and fraying civic tolerance, when our shared sense of reality is splintering into politicized distortions of our world, Elon Musk has launched his most successful gambit. It is the perfected version of The Sun’s lucrative hoax, a Disinformation Machine that, by design, hands cash to the best liars who attract blue-checked bigots, while fooling the most people.

III: Three Machines, As One

One can be prone to overly romanticizing the past, so it’s worth emphasizing that Twitter was never an idyllic paradise of civility nor a bastion of truth. It did have its moments, of course, such as when I received an important warning of particular interest to me—and my similarly-named brethren—as a certain “MattyCFC88” alerted me that “COVID is a scam and the vaccine is being given out to control your brians.”

Twitter also bestowed upon us two of the greatest incidents of political oratory in history, typed by the thumbs of Iowa’s elderly Republican Senator:

But despite these glorious moments, social media embeds features that tend to make it terrible. As Siva Vaidhyanathan pointed out in his book Anti-Social Media, these platforms require three machines to coalesce: the pleasure machine, the attention machine, and the surveillance machine. The dopamine from retweets and likes generates pleasure; rapidly refreshing feeds with shiny objects and sensational lies capture attention, and the site monitors your digital habits and hoovers up your data to “generate a data economy for commercialization to third parties.”

To some extent, then, all social media platforms are addictive disinformation machines, but Musk has dropped the pretence to an astonishing degree. Not only does his Machine employ a tiny fraction of the content moderators compared to its rivals, but Musk has now come up with a mechanism to twist the attention-seeking components to be deliberately geared toward the worst kinds of attention. Just as polarization in politics is worsened by low-turnout primaries, in which politicians need only to attract and win over the most ideologically extreme elements in their party’s base, so too does Musk’s protocol ensure that conspiratorial liars get the biggest rewards when they draw in other conspiratorial liars or an assorted array of Muskian fanboys.

Such systemic changes will make a bad situation worse. Already, Musk’s warping of social media has expanded the “Overton Window” of acceptable political discourse, in which the just asking questions mentality has risen to the highest echelons of presidential politics. For example, J.D. Vance, with a knowing twinkle in his smokey eye, mainstreamed a racist lie about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio without any regard to whether it was true. Hoax or not, it doesn’t matter! Some people were saying it, there were reports, and anyway, it’s getting people’s attention. Who could blame the man who wants to be a heartbeat away from wielding nuclear weapons for having a destructively playful little dabble in the attention economy?

IV: A Warning from History

Alas, the Disinformation Machine doesn’t just turn minds capable of critical thinking to mush and sway opinions prior to elections. Unfortunately, it also facilitates the abuse of power by distracting attention away from actual political conspiracies, the ongoing abuses and machinations of corrupt, powerful people who would otherwise fear being exposed by reliable information pipelines.

A century ago, sensationalist newspaper editors in Chicago chased readers so aggressively that they spilled much of their ink on true crime mysteries, sensational gossip, and outlandish hoaxes. In the process, the corrupt kingpins that ran the city were free to run wild, the robber barons unchecked. The disgusting conditions of factories—as exposed by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906—and the opaque nexus between organized crime and political bosses, were allowed to fester precisely because the pipelines supposedly devoted to truth were clogged with intriguing deceptions instead.

We would be wise to learn from that parable. Our attention is finite, and the more we divert it to sensationalist lies, the more that we aid and abet actual conspiracies and corruption that warrant harsh public scrutiny. If we aren’t careful, we’ll meme ourselves straight into dystopia. Unfortunately, amid those embers of a dysfunctional society burning itself down, it’s clear that those who lit the match on the internet will inevitably become rich, now with the help of Musk.

Musk’s Perfect Disinformation Machine is the inevitable extension of a toxic information ecosystem that, in the words of Julien Gorbach, “succeeded in nothing so well as to completely unmoor the American public sphere from rational argument, reality, and truth.” And that, I lament, is worthy of our attention.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition was for everyone, but I rely on reader support, so if you value my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to keep this sustainable. Or, consider buying my book—FLUKE.

1. Musk hates when people still call it Twitter, but he should have considered that before he renamed it something as stupid as “X.”

2. Full disclosure: my Twitter account is affixed with a blue check. Musk bestowed that on users who have a certain number of followers. Rest assured, dear reader, that I did not—and will never—pay for a blue check. I am involuntarily tarred with the unfortunate social baggage it represents.

3. It is hard to imagine a more honest signal than being a Tesla Cybertruck owner.

4. It would not surprise me if the payouts were in chunks of $4.20, because Elon Musk is a manchild with a permanently stunted sense of juvenile humor (that’s why he bought Twitter at the share price he bid, which was $54.20, so that it would align with 420, the number associated with smoking weed).

5. I produced a “Power Corrupts” podcast episode about Blair. You can listen here.