Beyond the obvious answer that Twitter was influential in the tech industry and many people here worked there or used open source projects which had ties there,

Beyond the obvious answer that Twitter was influential in the tech industry and many people here worked there or used open source projects which had ties there, Musk gets a lot of attention because he seeks it out. He really likes to portray himself as the hero-industrialist saving the world from dysfunctional “politically-correct” governments which was common in the 80s and 90s sci-fi novels he almost certainly was exposed to at a young age. A lot of people here really wanted that to be true - the dream of rockets to Mars, brain interfaces, etc. is cool and the way he talks about “real engineering” sounds really appealing to anyone who’s cranking out CRUD apps at an MBA-dominated company. He could have kept his mouth shut and enjoyed that reputation for the rest of his life, but he seems to crave being in the limelight and especially painting himself as some kind of hero standing up to orthodoxy. When he bought Twitter, a common comparison was to an alcoholic buying a bar and I think that’s really true. He’s thrown away billions on incredibly bad business decisions starting by locking himself into an agreement to pay twice as much as Twitter was worth, financed in a way which immediately created a huge cash flow problem, and promptly drove away enough advertisers to make the problems even worse. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, etc. would likely not have bought it in the first place but if they had, it wouldn’t have been amateur hour. They would have paid an appropriate amount, had a business plan which makes sense when sober, and above all they wouldn’t be spouting off in public giving people reasons to leave and linking it so heavily to the corporate brand. If Jeff Bezos was secretly an extreme Republican, he’d be talking in public about how taxes should be lower to help strengthen business or the other kinds of anodyne statements which are priced in for billionaires. If he wanted to funnel money to an extremist candidate or cause it’d be run through industry groups and PACs explicitly to avoid giving Amazon customers a reason to hesitate the next time they’re shopping. Tesla is getting slaughtered because a huge fraction of their prospective buyers have been forced to recognize that their money goes to someone with views they strongly oppose - the CEO of Toyota probably has beliefs I don’t share but I don’t know any of them and it’s not linked to the brand identity, whereas the number of people view a Tesla as a MAGA hat on wheels must be giving their marketing department daily stress headaches.