Is Elon Musk the new Liz Truss?

Truss lost and, in time, he will too, writes Marie Le Conte

There isn’t even some great, smug satisfaction at the end of it all (Getty)

Will Elon Musk step down as chief executive of Twitter? I have no idea. He might have done it by the time this is published, or he might not. Maybe he’ll have made it illegal to use the letter “a” by then, or banned non-binary people from the app altogether. Who knows.

Musk tweeted a poll asking users if they thought he should step down and those users – your columnist very much included – did, at the time of writing, just tell him precisely where to stick it. It is unclear whether anything will change.

What is certain, on the other hand, is that the chaos will continue in one form or another for the foreseeable future. In the Elon Musk era, there isn’t such a thing as a quiet Twitter news week.

It feels reminiscent of the Liz Truss days, all 45 of them. Every morning you could wake up and look at the news and correctly feel that the government might feasibly fall by nighttime. Often it survived and lived to fight another day, but really, each wound made it weaker. It stumbled and stumbled, then it collapsed.

There is a world in which Musk’s Twitter keeps staggering on for a while longer, but whatever is happening now doesn’t feel sustainable in the long run. Truss lost and, in time, he will too.

The other thing those two have in common is that they were never going to succeed. It was always obvious that they would fail; their flaws were there for all to see, right from day one. No one could pretend that running a country or one of the world’s largest social media companies is easy but still, they were and are uniquely ill-suited to the task at hand.

In fact, the same could be said of Truss’s predecessor. Anyone with half a brain and even a vague interest in British politics could have guessed that Boris Johnson’s premiership would end in embarrassing failure, long before he even walked into No 10. You didn’t need to be an expert or a Trot – his personal shortcomings were hard to miss.

Still, we had to sit and watch it all unfold. We had to sit and watch Boris Johnson alienate his entire parliamentary party, more or less one by one, then drown in a number of successive scandals of his own making. We had to sit and watch Liz Truss get elected as leader of the Conservatives, announce a series of catastrophic policies threatening to wreck the economy, then get destroyed by her own hubris.

We are now sitting and watching Elon Musk run a website into the ground, bit by bit, because his ego is too large and his skin too thin to do an even semi-competent job. It’s exhausting. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Exhausting.

There isn’t even some great, smug satisfaction at the end of it all. You can’t really wink and smile and say you knew it’d happen, in the same way that a passenger spotting the iceberg from afar wouldn’t have felt smug by the Titanic actually sinking. If you’re in the boat, you’re in the boat.

We’ve all been in the boat for a while now. Brexit was the first iceberg; it was obvious that it would go poorly. It doesn’t mean we’ve not spent over six years watching everything unfold exactly in the way it was always going to.

I’m not sure how we can break out of this cycle. Clearly, there are people so blinded by partisan optimism that nothing can convince them they are wrong, at least not until it’s too late. I hope they grow up soon or become a minority small enough to be ignored. I’m exhausted.