His political power is premised in large part on the supposition that his following on X is authentic. Given his interests in AI, self-professed belief that Twitter, as it used to be called, is overrun by bots, and ownership and control of X, is there any reason to believe that this is true? How do we know that his human following hasn’t declined precipitously since his hard-right turn and been steadily replaced by bot accounts?

I know, you’ll say “but–richest man–can buy politicians” and I say yes, but only on credit which could get yanked away at any time, should his following be revealed as inauthentic. His net worth is premised mostly on stock shares in a company with serious problems (which he is doing nothing to solve) facing stiff competition in a troubled niche industry (the electric car market). He had to borrow huge amounts of money in order to buy Twitter because he does not have the cash and if he were to sell that much money in Tesla shares it would cause an investor panic and precipitous decline in his net worth.

And so now we can see why he likely had to buy Twitter; he probably had no choice: the company was likely about to expose or tamp down on his fraudulent and bot-driven following, which would create loss of investor confidence in his brands, which is the only thing propping them up given their weak fundamentals. The Emperor has no clothes, folks.