Poster boy
外刊原文
Elon Musk’s transformation, in his own words
Our analysis of 38,000 posts on X reveal a changed man
“SURE, YOU might say something silly once in a while, as I do, but that way people know it’s really you!” As part of a plea for “political & company leaders” to join him in holding forth on X, his social network, Elon Musk has repeatedly stressed that such posts offer an unusual and engaging authenticity. We have taken him at his word. What do his tweets say about him?
To work out what subjects preoccupy Mr Musk and how his views have changed over time, The Economist analysed his activity on Twitter (as it was) and X (as it became in 2023). Using artificial intelligence to trawl through his 38,358 posts between December 2013 and November 2024, we found that he is posting far more often and with a far more political bent. Climate change and clean energy used to be the realm of policy on which he opined the most, but he now bangs on much more about immigration and free speech (see chart 1).
Mr Musk posts vastly more than he used to. From December 2013 to the middle of 2018, he tweeted just over a dozen times a week, on average. Between then and October 27th 2022, when he completed the purchase of X, he was posting 50 times a week. Since the takeover, that has risen to around 220 a week.
Those who follow him—and over 200m do—may also have noticed a shift in subject-matter. From 2016 to 2021 between 30% and 50% of his tweets each year were about Tesla or SpaceX, his two biggest companies. These days only 11% are. Meanwhile the share of his posts that are political has risen from less than 4% in 2016 to over 13% this year (see chart 2).
The shift in the topics of such posts is even more dramatic. In 2022, as he was buying Twitter, posts about free speech surged. This was followed by a leap in 2023 and 2024 in talk of immigration, border control, the integrity of elections and the “woke mind virus”. (The vicissitudes of poor regulation has remained a common topic throughout.)
Despite his considerable business interests outside America, few posts mention other countries. Between 2017 and 2020 around 1% touched on China, but often in passing (“China & Japan have awesome trains…”) or to praise Tesla’s unit there. His interest in the country has since waned. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr Musk showed little interest in either country, but in 2022 they featured in almost 3% of his tweets. The only other country to crop up in more than 1% of his posts in recent years is Brazil, after the country briefly blocked X in August this year.
To his followers Mr Musk advocates a fierce focus on missions he sees as urgent, such as making humans an “interplanetary species” by colonising Mars. But his own posts reveal shifting interests over the past few years, with the only truly intense focus on the act of posting itself. He may have more money than anyone else on Earth and the ear of the next president, but to a casual observer, he may not seem that different from any other American man in his 50s: lurching rightward politically, online a huge share of the time, complaining about immigration and mocking the left.
参考译文
马斯克变了！
我们分析了 X 上的 38,000 条帖子，发现马斯克变了！
“当然，你可能偶尔会说些傻话，就像我一样，但这样人们就知道这确实是你！” 作为号召“政-治和公司领导者”加入他在社交网络 X 上发声的一部分，埃隆·马斯克反复强调这种帖子提供了一种不同寻常且引人入胜的真实性。我们已经相信了他的话。他的推文透露了什么？
从科技创新的旗手，到政治话语场的活跃发声人，马斯克的社交媒体风格堪称“蝶变”。曾经专注于气候变化和清洁能源的他，如今已将矛头直指移民、言论自由等敏感议题。发帖频率从每周十余条激增至220条，政治类帖子占比更是从不到4%跃升至13%，俨然已是一个不折不扣的"网络键盘侠"。
尽管身家全球顶尖，但马斯克的社交媒体兴趣已悄然从企业运营转向意识形态争鸣。对中国、俄乌等国际热点的关注似乎渐渐褪色，取而代之的是对本土政治议题的孜孜以求。这种转变，或许折射出一个成功企业家对社会话语权的不懈追求。
在追随者眼中，昔日专注于开拓太空、改变能源格局的科技精英，如今已蜕变为一个标准的中年美国男性：政治立场持续右倾，沉迷社交媒体，对移民和左翼阵营不吝批评。这位曾被誉为"改变世界"的企业家，正上演一出关于个人品牌重塑的现代寓言。
感谢大家阅读，Enjoy!
来源：The Economist- November 23-29, 2024
原文标题：Elon Musk’s transformation, in his own words
* 参考译文并非一一对应。