Three days earlier than Elon Musk agreed to purchase Twitter, the world’s richest man tweeted a photograph of Bill Gates and used a crude sexual time period to make enjoyable of his stomach.

Playful, aggressive and sometimes juvenile, Musk’s previous tweets present how he has used social media to craft his public picture as a brash billionaire unafraid to offend. They may additionally reveal clues as to how Musk will govern the platform he hopes to personal.

“Look at the feed: It’s all over the place. It’s erratic. At times it’s pretty extreme,” mentioned Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University professor who research social media and who lately assigned Musk’s tweets as studying materials for his or her college students. “It paints him as some sort of rebel leader who will take control of the public square to save it. That is a myth he has constructed.”

Musk joined Twitter in 2010 and now has greater than 85 million followers — the seventh most of any account and the very best for any enterprise chief. He had mused about shopping for the location earlier than he agreed on Monday to pay $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,37,244 crore) for Twitter, which he mentioned he hopes to show right into a haven the place all speech is allowed.

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk wrote in a tweet.

As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk makes use of his Twitter account to make enterprise bulletins and promote his enterprises. He muses about know-how and commerce, however has additionally posted jokes about ladies’s breasts and as soon as in contrast Canada’s prime minister to Hitler. He often weighs in on world occasions, as he did in March 2020 when he tweeted that “The coronavirus pandemic is dumb.”

He’s also used the account to punch back at critics, such as when he called a diver working to rescue boys trapped in a cave in Thailand a “pedo,” short for pedophile. The diver had previously criticized Musk’s proposal to use a sub to rescue the boys. Musk, who won a defamation suit filed by the diver, later said he never intended “pedo” to be interpreted as “pedophile.”

Just a few years in the past, after software program engineer Cher Scarlett criticised Musk’s dealing with of the cave incident, the tech billionaire fired again and he or she was quickly being harassed by dozens of Musk’s on-line followers. He later deleted the posts, however not earlier than Scarlett needed to lock down her account as a result of she was receiving so many hateful messages.

“It’s ironic to me that somebody who claims they want to buy Twitter to protect free speech has such thin skin,” she mentioned. “He’s a very smart man, and when he replies to people that criticize him, he knows what he’s doing. To me that’s not championing free speech, it’s weaponising free speech, and I think that’s what he’ll do owning this platform.”

Nineteen-year-old Jack Sweeney received Musk’s consideration when he created an automatic Twitter account that tracked the actions of Musk’s jet. Musk responded by providing Sweeney $5,000 to drag the account. When Sweeney refused, Musk blocked him on Twitter.

Sweeney mentioned he is frightened he might get kicked off the location fully if Musk’s takeover is accredited. But he mentioned he likes Musk’s free speech absolutism, and hopes he sees it by means of.

“He’ll make it more open, and I think that’s a good thing,” Sweeney mentioned.

Musk’s use of Twitter has additionally led to issues for his personal corporations. In one August 2018 tweet, as an illustration, Musk asserted that he had the funding to take Tesla non-public for $420 (roughly Rs. 32,180) a share, though a court docket has dominated that it wasn’t true. That led to an SEC investigation that Musk continues to be preventing.

More lately, Musk appeared to have violated SEC guidelines that required him to reveal that he’d acquired a 5 p.c stake in Twitter; as a substitute he waited till he had greater than 9 p.c. Experts say these points aren’t prone to have an effect on his Twitter acquisition.

Last yr one other federal company, the National Labor Relations Board, ordered Musk to delete a tweet that officers mentioned illegally threatened to chop inventory choices for Tesla workers who joined the United Auto Workers union.

Those tweets helped cement Musk’s popularity as a brash outsider, a workingman’s billionaire, Grygiel mentioned. But that does not imply he’s outfitted to run a social media platform with greater than 200 million customers, the professor added.

“Maybe he wants to burn it down,” Grygiel mentioned. “I don’t know. But I do know that it shows that no one person should have this kind of power.”