Twitter vs. Substack: Understanding Elon Musk Through His Lens, Not Yours

There Is No Competition; Competition Is For Losers.

As I sift through the mountain of squawking into the aether on either side of this Twitter vs. Substack fiasco, I realize there’s a certain odd propensity to view Elon Musk’s actions, right or wrong, good or bad, through the lens of one’s own perceptions. This is likely because Elon Musk, as a human being, can be particularly difficult to understand if one has no experience with anyone else who uses his particular lens to view the world.

So, let’s take a look without judgment at his actions and the likeliest motivations behind them in an attempt to understand who he is and use that knowledge as a codex for understanding why he is choosing these particular actions.

Elon Musk is a long game thinker, an INTJ “mastermind” who has his own plan mapped out 20 steps ahead of everyone else. INTJ personalities are rare, only comprising about 2.1% of the population - but all INTJs do this. It’s simply how the INTJ mind works. Elon Musk just happens to be extremely adept at it.

The characteristics of the 16 types are all on a spectrum and then you have assertive/turbulent, and whether or not the person has delved into their own shadow side, uncovered their blind spots, etc. So you can have light, dark, and neutral versions of each type. But due to the default modes of thinking and feeling for most of the types, most of them, save INFJ and ENTJ, would be unlikely to be able to chart out and understand the way an INTJ sees the world, regardless of alignment. As such, it would be very difficult for most to predict what an INTJ is going to do next and why, especially when that INTJ is particularly smart and adept and has access to what the majority of people would consider to be just about infinite resources.

Whether Elon Musk’s decisions benefit or harm anyone else is purely incidental to his getting what he wants out of the decisions he makes, which is why he's great at business - and also why many people either find fault with that or cannot understand it. It’s a point of view which is not at all relatable to them. They do not understand or relate to his lens, and so they cannot see him through his own lens, only through their own skewed version of what his lens might look like - an Elon-shaped distortion of their own lens. And that is neither accurate nor helpful.

I'm speaking from a place of analysis, not judgment.

Elon Musk simply plays a better game of real world chess than everyone else by nature of the way he processes the world around him - and the proof is in his net worth.

Most people at this level have no autonomy because they are responsible for so much and so many. You would think money would buy autonomy, but that isn't so past a certain point - there's a sweet spot you need to hit for that to happen, and he has far surpassed it.

Even though he's set himself up to lose his claim on his own time by doing too well, he's still able to separate his biases from his decision making processes and do what makes sense to his end goals, one of which might be to buy out the influence of anyone to whom he is beholden in order to recoup some of the autonomy he has lost by being at the top of his game.

His decision making is purely mercenary. He has no particular attachment to any ideology because that would be bad for business. Self-interest in the purest sense of the term would be the only lens in this case which is NOT bad for business.

Again, I'm not saying that as a judgment, nor am I excusing the consequences of this mode of thinking. There are pros and cons to everything. I am merely making a statement of what IS.

For example, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk took over PayPal and built it up together. The alums of the original group who did this together are often referred to as the “PayPal Mafia.”

This is Thiel speaking, but this illustrates how they think: Competition is for losers. If you cannot build a monopoly within a space, there is no point to making an acquisition within that space. Someone who is not an INTJ cannot be ruthless enough to take this advice to its most illogical conclusion, and so they cannot understand this mode of thinking because they cannot relate to this lens. However, in the hands of an INTJ, this is basically like the nuclear bomb of business acumen.

Musk has made an acquisition within this space and therefore we can expect that he is either determined to capture a monopoly on social or he is utilizing the acquisition of this particular platform in order to achieve a larger goal. (We’ll get to that later.)

If it serves Musk to position himself on the side of a particular an ideological viewpoint, he will do it, but he will shed that position the moment it doesn't serve him anymore because his goals supersede his ideologies.

Loyalties are not set in stone but weighed against strategy. All decisions are crafted to position him toward the end goal, no matter how anyone else perceives those actions. Public perception tends to be fickle and may be shifted with a well-placed public relations campaign as easily as the wind changes directions.

Most opinions are bought in our culture. They have been since the time of Bernays. And that’s if one even cares what others think. If altering public opinion is strategic and makes sense to the end goal, perhaps that’s in the budget. If not, no, because ultimately it doesn’t matter, and most people have the attention span of a gnat. Whatever Elon Musk does, one way or another, will be memoryholed by the next thing he does. The same goes for everyone else in the public eye. Opinions shift when you throw some money at a tastemaker and wait ten minutes.

This is not about judging him for that. More to the point, it behooves the public to understand that he (and all other tastemakers, if so inclined) can fool people into thinking you can set a watch by what he's going to do next based upon these cloaks of ideology he changes like a cardigan. But most will never understand this because they don't understand how the mind of a super wealthy INTJ with mercenary business acumen would behave. Most people have staunch ideologies that they stand behind and use to filter their ways of perceiving and interacting with the world. They simply cannot conceptualize a person who uses positioning as a tool to that degree.

The loyalty is to the end game, not to the ideologies or people involved. You can see in the fact that he works practically 24 hours per day that his responsibilities far exceed the amount of time he has available to devote to them, and yet, he just keeps building and building and building. Why? The end game is that important to him.

So what is the end game?

Free speech idealism is a red herring. Many of us knew that. But the rest fail to see the big picture surrounding his choices and the fact that ALL of his choices interlock across the board - because that’s what an INTJ does. While you’re stuck sussing out the current move on the board, INTJs are permutating moves 20 steps ahead of the one you are on. And it takes them only a split second to do so.

If you examine everything he's doing across the board - not just what hits the news cycle - and fit the pieces together, if you suss out why he has chosen to do these things, you'll see a map emerge which solidifies his position and the steps he needs to take toward his goals well into the future.

So before we jump 20 moves ahead to where he is, let’s look at the current move….

What is the benefit of censoring Substack links?

Whenever a Twitter user clicks on a Substack link inside the Twitter platform, the user is taken to a page meant to deter the user from continuing on to the Substack page by issuing a warning that the content might be “unsafe.”

The example below is from one of my own Substack links. This occurs regardless of the topic of the article. This is happening to all Substack links across the board as a blanket Twitter policy which impacts Substack writers as much as it does Substack itself.

Alex Berenson even called out Elon Musk for it on his Twitter. Berenson pointed out that makes his money from his Substack and was also one of the trusted journalists handpicked by Elon Musk’s team to review the Twitter files along with Matt Taibbi.

Taibbi’s Twitter files disappeared and then suddenly reappeared when Taibbi called it out as well. This led to Elon Musk posting his rationale behind what had occurred which was then, ironically and hilariously, factchecked by Twitter itself.

As Berenson stated on the Twitter platform, “The writers you respect (include me or not, no matter) - the writers you asked to help with the Twitter Files! - are independents and largely support themselves on Substack. Why punish them and further damage your free-speech credibility?”

Many have pointed out that animosity toward Substack is on the heels of Substack having rolled out “Notes,” a microblogging subplatform within the Substack network, which might qualify as “competition.”

The following is what Chris Best had to say about this on Substack’s new Notes subplatform, which is still in beta, slowly rolling out to Substack’s superusers first before going wide to the entire platform.

However, we see no moves being made to silence the posts of people utilizing Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, etc., links that would also be considered “competitor links” technically.

And subsequently, this particular form of content blocking has been lifted from Substack links, but there is no guarantee that these links are not still being shadowbanned or are possibly getting dinged through the algorithm itself to keep them from showing up as prominently in search, in the main news feed, or in the feeds of those who follow a user who is or has been posting links from Substack.

So, this clearly doesn’t have anything to do with free speech or a broadstroke wipeout of “competition.” This a strategic attack on Substack itself in order to accomplish a specific goal.

Remember, “competition is for losers.” I think Elon Musk was trying to make Substack hurt so they will agree to a hostile takeover. In fact, Elon Musk has openly expressed interest in acquiring Substack as recently as December 2022, according to Business Insider.

Do you remember this now? Do you see what I mean about the memoryholing? To our own complete and utter detriment, the American public has the collective attention span of Dory from Finding Nemo, re-meeting Nemo over again at the completion of every news cycle.

Making Substack “taboo” on Twitter may have been intended to drive down the value of Substack ahead of a move toward hostile acquisition.

Musk is not trying to “free the public square.” He's potentially attempting to control it because there are other goals he has that would require him to have control over it in order to best proceed. Balancing this with “public opinion” is secondary.

Capturing social media platform properties is a mere fraction of the end goal, but it's the one that gets the most press because it's the one which overtly affects the most people in the present. So while this is integral to his overall plan, in the light of media attention, it seems more important than it is - to him, it's just a cog. He literally bought the public square and took it private. He can do whatever he wants with it. But it's really just a $44B tiny piece of the puzzle.

What happens when we look at these plans in tandem?

I’ll give you a hint: I suggest that you look at the many companies Elon Musk owns and see them not as separate startups and acquisions but as the interlocking pieces of one interconnected, overarching goal.

My Master’s degree was in interactive telecommunications, so when I see the properties he has amassed, my mind sees an obvious trail of connected dots among them which creates a slippery slope that I couldn’t possibly ignore while standing in my integrity.

For instance, if you’re seeing this clearly, you might have some understandable reservations about a future which may include a social credit based Twitter platform integration connected to Starlink constellations via Neuralink, which could hypothetically control your nervous system to render you immobile or trigger your self-driving car not to start or to drive itself over a cliff if your social credit score drops too low. This is one of many potential dystopian nightmare scenarios which honestly might be more dangerous than Facebook/Meta/F8, Instagram, Tiktok, and Google Lambda combined.

While the impact of these more immediate plans upon the Twitterverse might have affected me temporarily in an adverse manner, I know this is merely incidental. I’m well aware that I am not the target of these decisions. So I am choosing not to take these decisions personally.

On a personal note, I know the Universe has my back, and as long as I continue to speak my truth and serve my purpose, regardless of which platform I choose to use in order to do so, to how many people, and across however many platforms, this will all come out in the wash, not just for me but for all of those who are following their life path. Unless there is some crucial soul lesson to be had for us otherwise, we will be able to self-sustain until the world shifts if we remain vigilant and we will regain our footing thereafter.

However, given the probability that these technologies could eventually integrate and bring about havoc and mayhem, I’m sure you can see that there might be a bit of cause for concern, and therefore, vigilance. Barely anyone will see it coming because most people can't unlock themselves from perceiving other people through their own lenses - 70% of the population are sensory over intuition and have a difficult time utilizing intuition in order to draw conclusions from hard data sets. That's dangerous. (And most do not think 20 steps ahead for funsies like the INTJ does. They can barely choose what to have for breakfast.) Both skill sets are required in order to thrive, and survival forward thinkers cannot afford to ignore red flags.

As a friend pointed out, “It will be nice to write and speak whatever we want one of these lives.” While I agree with that wholeheartedly, I know by nature of humanity that freedom of speech is a forever battle: No matter what anyone says, someone will always try to silence someone else. Again, vigilance is key.

A crucial soul lesson from the Universe: Be prepared for everything while expecting the best. Never let your guard down, but do not fixate on the worst possible outcome. These things have a way of balancing themselves out over time.