Elon's New Right

Getting Rich Quick on Elon's Twitter

I think enough time has passed now that we can go back and look at what the end-state of Elon’s implementation of paid blue checks to Twitter has been.

For anyone unfamiliar, if you buy a blue check you get an artificial boost to your account that puts you at the top of any comments on a post, and at a certain level of popularity, it pays you (not much) based on your impressions.

This obviously creates an immediate structural incentive to maximize your visibility, and if you’re a shameless grifter who wants money, you’re going to find a way to do that. Considering that you’ll always be at the front of the line no matter how poor the quality of your reply is, your best bet is to constantly reply to the most heavily followed accounts on Twitter.

The account with the most followers is, of course, Elon himself, who in turn has the personality of a Tucker Carlson viewer who thinks 2010s rage comics are the funniest thing in the world.

The result of this has been the rise of a New Type of Guy™ I can only describe as having the aesthetic of 2010s Redditor with the politics of a Fox News talk show host.

Now I should be clear that as someone who has never used Reddit, I mean this in terms of the stereotype of a guy who enthusiastically uses Reddit. You know, the sort of guy that owns an excessive amount of Funko Pops and makes Narwhal Bacon jokes in 2024. They would be killing it in a stand-up club based on your mom’s favorite Facebook pages.

In contrast to other groups like the virulent racists that have taken advantage of the new Twitter incentive structure that prioritizes engagement above all else, these guys seem to notably not believe in anything at all.

Accounts like Wall Street Silver or DogeDesigner are realistically only right-wing insofar as being right-wing means that Elon will give you attention. I mean this in that they seem to be devoid of any real belief in a coherent right-wing ideology that could be pointed towards as a belief system.

If Elon is mad about immigration in the United States, all of these guys are now mad about immigration. If Elon posts about the Cyber Truck, suddenly every account with a Dogecoin profile is the Cyber Truck’s strongest soldier. If Elon thinks Ukraine is losing the war with Russia, a whole crop of military analysts emerges. You get my point.

It’s probably not surprising that these guys are also shilling crypto projects, rampantly spreading engagement-bait disinformation, or in most cases, both. The great promise of being a blue check influencer on Twitter these days is essentially a get-rich-quick scheme, and the most natural audience for that model are guys that were once hawking NFTs.

It’s not exactly a coincidence that people who dominate the new ecosystem of Twitter are guys like Mario Nawfal who built his brand off shilling NFTs. It’s just that, rather than whatever crypto coin will make him money, it’s misinformation about whatever news story of the week will get him views.

The same can be said of those who piled into GameStop stocks due to r/WallStreetBets or people who plowed entire paychecks into Dogecoin because Elon tweeted about it.

What I’m trying to say is that the new class of internet right-wing pundits don’t believe in anything. Social media is effectively the same thing to these guys as buying a bunch of options contracts on the SPY.

Except in this case, it’s more like crafting the precise personality that will get you the most views in this ecosystem—and if you’re lucky you’ll get the much sought-after Elon reply.

All of this forces these accounts to simultaneously present something like a “wholesome” personality based around nothing but the most generic internet memes so they can be perceived as being palatable, but then also pivot to whatever the insane topic of the day is.

This fine-tuned personality ends up creating an extremely jarring subset of people who on the one hand seem like they know the entire lore of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but on the other hand, are screaming about how the ADL controls the media in America because Elon has fixated on that.

Now, in turn, this all serves Elon’s interest in having his views repeated back to him verbatim by accounts he can interact with regularly, while also “validating” his claim that “citizen journalists” on Twitter are the ones who are creating real news.

I don’t want to overlook here that this is a two-way street. It equally serves Elon’s interest to present disinformation that’s heavily engaged with as evidence of how popular Twitter is as a source of news and opinion. It’s a very pyrrhic sort of public relations victory for Twitter that disinformation is so heavily consumed, regardless of the impact it has had on Twitter’s advertising revenue.

This is all in comparison to someone like Libs of TikTok or Jack Posobiec, who despite being unabashed grifters, are right-wing. I mean, they’re idiots, but they have something that could be described as a worldview.

Despite spreading disinformation and inflammatory rhetoric, I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb when I claim they’re doing this in service of their own political goals rather than hoping Elon replies to them so they can get rich.

I do want to be clear that I’m not overlooking that he of course interacts with these accounts and other outright racists, but for the sake of this piece, I’m just focusing on a certain subset that he’s directly and indirectly cultivated through specific incentives on Twitter.

However, even among the crowd that can be called sincerely right-wing, their meal ticket has been shifting to Elon’s incentives. People like Ian Miles Cheong are just as often transparently tailoring their content to whatever subject Elon is fixated on for a given day as they are talking to whatever could be called their “organic” audiences.

The sort of hypercompetitive marketplace for clout means that traditional grifters that could once reliably count on a core audience have to compete with the guy who 6 months ago had put their life savings into a picture of an ape. There is only so much money to go around after all, and not everyone is going to get a sponsorship from the MyPillow guy.

This is to say that I see the future of the platform as being essentially dominated by this style of engagement for as long as Elon is the owner of Twitter.

It’s how every institution on Earth builds its incentive structures. You create a set of rewards so you produce on average certain kinds of members of a given community.

Rewarding certain behaviors, and providing a pathway upwards in a hierarchy for adhering to explicit and implicit rules is how any bureaucracy creates norms. After that you just let the inertia of self-selection do its work.

I’d expect that a year from now, even more people will catch onto the prevailing winds, and amidst the endless porn bots and AI blue checks, there are going to be thousands more Dogecoin guys pretending to be right-wing for the chance to make a living off posting.

If Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy can be trusted, eventually, the entire core user base of Twitter will be nothing but people with Doge profiles screaming about immigrants.