Elon Musk Loves Karl Marx—Here’s Why

Elon Musk, the richest capitalist ever to walk the earth, just took a page out of Karl Marx’s playbook.

Karl Marx? Wasn’t he the creator of communism and one of the world’s greatest anti-capitalists? Yep. Didn’t capitalism defeat communism in the early 1990s after the Berlin Wall came down? Yep, true again. In general, capitalism beats communism, at least if economic wealth creation is the end goal, rather than fairness. But that doesn’t matter for what we I’m talking about here.

The fact remains that Karl Marx was brilliant. In fact, he’s more cited than Einstein, Curie, and Fermi combined, and considered the most-cited scholar in history. That’s partly because he zeroed in what makes capitalism a driver of wealth creation. Simply put, capitalism equals ownership. Capitalists own the things that make the money. As Marx famously suggested, capitalism is about owning the means of production — financial capital, plant and equipment, and labor.

Now back to Musk. Musk understands Marx, especially the idea of owning the means of production. Musk was co-founder of PayPalPYPL
, which controls finance on the web. He owns his companies’ plants, technology, and EV batteries. And he very craftily invests in labor. As a student at the University of Pennsylvania, he designed a combined bachelor’s degree in physics and business, which later became a prized pairing for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors, one that enabled them to pursue capitalism ever more effectively.

So if Musk is a prototypical capitalist, why do I believe he is paying tribute to Marx? I’ll present that argument here, along with how Musk will benefit from owning the global virtual town square (TwitterTWTR
) and how he might do that more effectively.

Seizing the Memes of Production

I believe Musk is paying tribute to Marx in his recent business moves because Musk recognizes the means of production have changed. Orange is the new black. Memes are the new means, and Musk is seizing them in a big way (as I’ll explain in a moment).

Memes are collective beliefs, opinions, or practices that spread quickly through a society and control mass behavior, from the things we buy, to the things we say, to the ideas we perpetuate. Memes have always existed, but in the past they moved much more slowly and methodically through a society. Christianity, for example, began as a meme.

Today, social media platforms enable memes to spread almost instantaneously worldwide – they go viral. Memes can be humorous or inspiring – cute pet videos or impossible feats of athleticism. But memes also drive disinformation, conspiracies, and hate speech. Scientific studies have found that memes for good and for bad now take up most of the public’s mental space, energy, and time, and can monopolize mainstream media. Here’s the kicker: bad ones race like a Ferrari through the social landscape, while the good memes move like reliable but slow minivans, doomed never to catch up with their false counterparts. All of this means memes create and perpetuate the preferences that drive consumer behavior—and they do so largely via propagation on Twitter.

Owning the Virtual Global Town Square

Last week, Elon Musk announced that he will buy Twitter for the original agreed-upon price of $54 a share. Now you might say that Musk’s failed attempt to back out of the deal indicates the acquisition is a mistake. But don’t forget that Musk is a shrewd negotiator. In fact, I agree with observers that Musk’s attempt to renege on the deal was renegotiated a better deal. In the end, I think Musk anchored high to get Twitter’s board to unquestionably agree to the deal and do so before other buyers created a bidding war (the Trump organization was rumored to be interested in Twitter, for example).

So what does it mean for Musk to own the biggest meme of production? He has signaled several consequences. In stating he would reinstate Trump as a Twitter user, he clearly earned a big “favor” in return from both Trump Republicans and Fox News. Further, it ensures that Trump knows that if Musk giveth, Musk can taketh away, which makes the former president and his millions of fans even more beholden to him.

Economically, owning Twitter also gives Musk a giant billboard to shape opinion about his companies, and you can guess which side (positive) he’ll err on. Recall that he was fined by the SEC for using Twitter to affect his stock price in 2018. But if he owns Twitter, it may give him more ways to achieve such goals without crossing legal lines.

Musk also pumps up his brand and ego by giving the impression that he solves the BIG problems (though he lacks any qualification to do so). Cases in point: though he is not a demographer, he felt perfectly confident to advise Japan that their low birth rates would lead to collapse. (That, by the way, flies in the face of history. Japan’s very low birthrate post-WWII didn’t lead to a collapse of society, but to the opposite – the country became a top economic powerhouse.). Recently, Musk decided to tell Ukraine how to negotiate a peace treaty with Russia. Strangely, his advice gave everything to Russia! Owning Twitter will give Musk a much larger platform to dispense such criticism and benefit himself and his brand.

Still, Musk says he’s buying Twitter for democracy’s sake – by owning and maintaining the world’s virtual town square. But unless Musk knows something no one else does, Twitter needs a massive redesign to become a truly democratic town square. For example, how will Musk rid Twitter of malicious bots that spread disinformation, the Big Lie, hate speech, and conspiracy theories, which weaken rather than strengthen democracy? Common sense suggests that creating an “edit” (read: oops) button that enables users to edit Tweet’s after posting false or offensive comments won’t work because it can be so readily misused to spread disinformation and excuse hate speech without reversing the damage of the original tweet.

A Better Path to Virtual Democracy

In the pursuit of offering solutions to these problems, my lab has identified a potentially powerful tool that does not curb free speech through any form of third-party censorship and encourages good behavior. The idea is to make accounts verifiable. Verifiable accounts identify a real person by their real name. We found that verifiable accounts on average produce relatively little toxicity on Twitter, versus their unverified counterparts.

Why? Because fake identities remove the need to be accountable. Verifiable accounts thus motivate users to monitor and curtail their own toxic behavior. Also, aliases can still be used by users from oppressed groups to get their opinion into the town square if they have less than a few thousands of followers, because accounts with that many followers don’t push things virally.

Of course one simple solution isn’t enough to truly democratize Twitter. But by combining verified accounts with other smart systems and technologies that adjust behavior, Musk and Twitter have a chance to make things better. In short, if Musk genuinely seeks to use the memes of production to create the ideal town square, he needs to rebuild Twitter right. Otherwise, he’s just building new walls rather than taking them down.