At Twitter, Elon Musk is tilting at his own windmills – Quartz

Elon Musk locked his Twitter account this week, having convinced himself that something was awry within the website’s all-powerful algorithm. “Made my account private until tomorrow morning to test whether you can see my private tweets more than my public ones,” Musk wrote just after midnight US eastern time on Feb. 1.It’s possible that Musk, once hailed as a Silicon Valley luminary for his work, has to try highly publicized experiments like this in order to divine what ghosts are in the machine that he just spent a large fraction of his wealth acquiring. But if you don’t buy that idea, then you might be onto something.The decision to run this particular experiment appears to have been inspired by chatter among a band of right-wing Twitter influencers with whom Musk frequently pals around on the website he bought for $44 billion. It’s another leg of his crusade against Twitter, a mission that began long before he took over the company. Musk is still tilting at windmills, and you’d be wrong to assume that he’ll stop just because he himself now controls those very windmills.Elon Musk needs an enemy to rage againstThe Elon Musk playbook is remarkably similar to the one
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