When Elon Musk First Saw His Wife Using Twitter, He Thought It Was a Waste of Time

A broken clock is right twice a day.

Days of Yore

A forthcoming book about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter includes a hilariously telling anecdote about the billionaire's first impression back when he initially encountered the site.

In their soon-to-be-released book "Character Limit," the New York Times' Ryan Mac and Kate Conger recounted that Musk wasn't a huge fan of the site when his first wife, Justine Musk, began using it during its early days.

When the serial entrepreneur's then-wife encouraged him to join the site, Musk initially dismissed it. While Justine used the site "constantly," per the NYT reporters' book, it seems that her husband considered it a waste of time.

Even after taking over the @ElonMusk account from an imposter in 2010 — this was back before the days of Twitter's original blue check verification system that he later destroyed — Musk still seemed to have little use for the service.

"Not sure I can handle just doing 140 char missives," the future Twitter owner wrote in a December 2011 post. Ironically, Musk added that he'd be putting his "longer thoughts" on Google Plus, which was shuttered in 2019. The jokes write themselves.

Turn Tables

Anyone who's ever suffered a Twitter addiction knows that once you start tweeting, it's hard to stop. That seems to have been the case for Musk, who by the end of 2011 was tweeting all manner of nonsense. Soon after, the multi-hyphenate billionaire seemed, as the NYT reporters noted, to realize how powerful Twitter could be and sought to harness it for his own ends.

As Conger and Mac report, Musk soon seemed to figure out that with Twitter, he could provide his increasingly adoring public with updates on Tesla and SpaceX and control his narrative in the face of the mainstream media he'd grown to distrust. The rest, as they say, is history.

While far from the first or last time this particular entrepreneur radically changed his mind, his Twitter about-face is perhaps one of the more conspicuous in Musk's storied flip-flopping history.

From ramping up his use of the site in late 2011 to outright purchasing it in 2022, the ensuing decade saw massive growth for both Twitter and its eventual owner. And as their paths further dovetailed, so too did the demise of the OG Twitter we once knew and loved.

More on Musk reversals: As He Realized His Mistake, Elon Musk Begged Twitter Staff to Turn Off the New Feature He'd Pushed For