Photo illustration by Rachel Stern for The New York Times; source photograph by Haiyun Jiang Share full article Opinion Columnist There are many damning anecdotes in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s new book, “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” but one from February of last year perfectly captures the astonishing pettiness of the world’s richest man. Attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, Musk had one of the most luxurious seats in the house, but rather than watching the game, he was glued to his phone in dismay. Both he and President Biden had sent tweets cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles, but even though Biden had far fewer followers than Musk on the platform, the president’s tweet garnered 29 million views to Musk’s 8.4 million. Livid, Musk demanded that his engineers find out why his tweet was underperforming Biden’s. He left the game early to fly back to his San Francisco office, where dozens of employees were summoned to meet him on a Sunday night. Eventually, to placate their boss, the engineers tweaked Twitter’s algorithm to boost Musk’s posts, pushing them into users’ feeds whether they follow him or not. “In effect, Musk’s tweets would have higher priority over any other post,” write Conger and Mac, technology reporters for The New York Times. As they put it toward the end of the book, “A man allergic to criticism had bought himself the largest audience in the world, and hoped for praise.” No wonder he and Trump get along. What Trump has done to the Republican Party, Musk has done to Twitter, which he’s renamed X. It was always bad, but now it’s much worse. Because Musk has ruined its system for verifying users and gutted its content moderation, it’s teeming with fake news; on Wednesday, for example, it was full of false claims, amplified by Musk himself, that a car with an explosive device inside was found near Donald Trump’s Long Island rally. White nationalists have been welcomed back onto the platform, and many journalists have fled. When I logged on just now, two of the first three posts in my feed were trollish squibs about voting fraud from Musk, whom I don’t follow. The silver lining to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is that he’s made it more marginal; Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina, is only the most recent MAGA candidate to implode. Similarly, Musk has transformed Twitter into a dull, fetid cesspool of white nationalism and paranoid lies. But by making it an extension of his own disordered id, he’s taken a platform that has always been toxic and decreased its relevance, especially to those outside the right. In March, Edison Research reported that the number of Americans who say they use Twitter has dropped from 27 percent to 19 percent, a 30 percent decline. Another study, from the market research group Sensor Tower, found in February that daily mobile use of the platform was down 23 percent since Musk took over. He bought Twitter for $44 billion and has reduced its value to less than half of that. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access.