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Did Elon Musk just tweet something terrible on Twitter?
Yup.
Did Elon Musk then realize it was so terrible — even by his standards — that he needed to delete that tweet?
Yup.
And is the second time in a month he's done the very same thing?
Yup.
This week's deleted tweet, for the record, was Musk musing why assassins haven't targeted Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Two weeks ago, it was Musk promoting a Tucker Carlson interview with a man who argued Hitler got a bad rap.
The only real difference between the two: This time out, Musk has attempted to explain why he made the terrible tweet — it was a joke, he explained, and it made his friends laugh. It didn't occur to him that other people wouldn't think it was hilarious.
If you've never paid any attention to anything Elon Musk does, you might take him at his word: That the man who owns Twitter, and has renamed it X, is just getting his head around the idea that things you do and say in private aren't necessarily things you want to put on the internet.
"Elon Musk says he's learned a lesson," as my colleagues at Business Insider put it.
But that isn't remotely true. He's been doing this stuff for years, and it's not getting better, and there's no reason to think it will.
"I'd say I'll see you the next time he does the same thing. But we can't do that every time he does the same thing, because it would get exhausting. Still: See you again, soon," I wrote way back on September 4 — 12 days ago.
At this rate, we may be coming back to this one more time before the month is up.
Just two more notes on this:
In the brief period between Musk's most recent deleted tweets, his company announced it had hired a new chief marketing officer: Angela Zepeda, who formerly headed marketing at Hyundai. The Wall Street Journal has a diligent profile of Zepada (TLDR: She's done a lot of work with Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino; she has hired famous people to appear in ads; she got layered at Hyundai this summer).
But, as always, it doesn't matter who Elon Musk has working on his Twitter ads business as long as Elon Musk keeps tweeting.
Also: A reminder that in addition to owning Twitter and using it to tweet terrible things, Elon Musk is the world's richest man and has enormous power. And it's important to remember that he often exercises it in ways that don't involve Twitter.
Earlier this year, for instance, Musk spent "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the district attorney in Travis County, Texas, as the Journal recently detailed.
Austin, where Musk spends a lot of time, is the seat of Travis County. And Musk had previously been vocal about his distaste for José Garza, the incumbent DA there. But the fact that he kept his financial support for Garza's opponent secret means he understands there are some things he doesn't want to say in public, for whatever reason.
Keep that in mind the next time we meet here again.
