Note: This is an update of my 2022 article: Elon Musk Probably Tweets Too Much
Since my 2022 article on his tweeting habits, Elon Musk has deteriorated substantially. He’s free-fallen into the alt right, and his Twitter has become a cesspool of racism, transphobia, and antisemitism. Slurs against minorities have surged, and advertisers have fled the platform.
Given these developments, I’ve decided to do another analysis of Elon Musk’s tweeting habits. Unfortunately, Elon almost immediately ended free access to the site’s API upon acquisition. So now, researchers like me can no longer efficiently pull tweet data, which has had major ramifications for academic research. This big-brained move has had other unintended consequences, such as gaming platforms like Xbox abandoning Twitter support.
Fortunately, I was able to build a script to pull Elon’s tweet data anyways. However, there is now a limit on how far back you can scroll on someone’s timeline (~3,000 tweets). For most people, that would be sufficient to pull years of data. For example, I was able to pull over 2 years of data for Virginia’s Senate candidates Tim Kaine and Hung Cao despite this limitation. In comparison, I was only able to pull under 50 days of Elon Musk’s tweets. You read that right, it took fewer than 50 days for Elon Musk to post ~3,200 tweets. For more information on my methodology (and some assumptions), click here. You can also click below to skip ahead in the article:
- Daily Tweets
- How long does Elon spend on Twitter?
- When does Elon tweet?
- What is Elon saying?
- Who is Elon interacting with?
- Conclusion
Daily Tweets
As of 2022, Elon was averaging 29.3 tweets/day after acquiring Twitter. Let’s see how things have changed since then.
In my opinion, this chart is crazy. Elon is averaging 67.8 tweets/day, and there have been weekdays (read: workdays) where he has tweeted over 150 times in one day.
After seeing this chart, one might wonder just how much time Elon spends on Twitter. Let’s address that next.
How much time does Elon spend on Twitter?
Fortunately, I was able to grab the timestamp of each of Elon’s tweets, which means we can do some basic, back-of-the-envelope analysis to estimate how long he spends on Twitter every day.
As a note, Elon is a wealthy man who travels a lot, so using a singular timezone for this analysis would be woefully inaccurate. Luckily, the amazing Jack Sweeney has created a bot that tracks the private jets of notable individuals like Elon. Despite legal threats from some of the most powerful (and petty) billionaires on the planet, he has refused to stop his work, which I think is truly admirable. Either way, thanks to his tracker, we can estimate Elon’s timezone at any given time to ensure we are accurate as possible.
For this analysis, let’s assume that Elon spends 2 minutes before and after each tweet on Twitter — two minutes crafting the tweet and two minutes afterwards reading replies. I also eliminate any “overlapping” periods. For example, if he makes one tweet at 11:50pm and another at 11:51pm, I use a period of 11:48pm to 11:53pm (5 minutes total) instead of two 4 minute periods before and after each tweet (8 minutes total). I think both of these assumptions are conservative, and likely vastly understate how long Elon actually spends on Twitter.
Let’s take a look at a visual of Elon’s “Top 10” most active days on Twitter, as well as the overall average during the analysis period.
Yes, that’s right. Using my method, I estimate that Elon spends ~2.7 hours per day on Twitter. Since late July, there have been workdays where Elon Musk has spent over 5 hours on Twitter in a single day.
This visual feels particularly jarring. To contextualize, Elon is worth an estimated $250 billion. Meanwhile, it would take the average American nearly 4 million years to earn that much. Four million years ago was about when our ancestors learned to walk on two legs. Stats like this should be enough to disabuse the notion that people like Elon — who’s wasting hours every day boosting racist trolls (more on that later) — have fairly “earned” their unimaginable wealth. Unless, of course, you think it’s possible to spend 2.7 hours a day on social media and still be ~4 million times more productive than the median American.
Of course, maybe it’s not all bad. Maybe he’s focused on work during the day, and Twitter is his only after-work hobby. Which brings us to the next section.
When does Elon tweet?
Again, let’s leverage that timestamp property of each tweet (and Jack Sweeney’s Elon jet tracker) to see when Elon tweets throughout the day.
Another crazy chart. This suggests that there isn’t really a time of day when Elon is not on Twitter. Even in his least active hour, Elon averages over 1 tweet per day. His most active period is from 10pm to 1am, when he tweets ~12.3 times on average. And during the standard workday (9am to 5pm), he averages over 18.5 tweets.
Okay, so we’ve pretty reasonably established that Elon tweets a lot at all times of the day. Now let’s take a quick look at what he’s saying and who he’s talking to.
What is Elon saying?
To start, we can build a Wordcloud to get an idea of Elon’s tweet content.
Okay, so this Wordcloud really only tells us that most of his tweets lack real substance (“yeah”, “wow”, “exactly”, “cool” are his most commonly used words). We do see a couple of things if we look closely, though:
- Trump pops up. This is not crazy surprising, as Elon’s rightwards turn has come along with an endorsement of Trump for the 2024 Presidential Election. That’s despite a public (and quite frankly, hilarious) feud between the two a few years back:
- The words “Brazil”, “Brazilian”, and “judge” also appear in this Wordcloud. These all refer to recent events where a Brazilian judge banned Twitter in Brazil. In response, Elon has gone a bit on a tirade, tweeting or retweeting about Judge Alexandre Moraes over 100 times in the last 25 days.
Okay, so that’s a sneak peek into what Elon is saying. Who is he interacting with?
Who is Elon interacting with on Twitter?
It’s important to see who Elon is interacting with on Twitter. As one of the most-followed accounts on Twitter, anyone he interacts with gets a huge boost in popularity and legitimacy.
I’ve highlighted two accounts in particular because they are particularly vile. Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) is a notoriously racist Malaysian man with an outsized opinion about American politics. I’ve highlighted one of his many disgusting tweets in this chart, where he fantasizes about shooting Black people. Cheong is incredibly active on Twitter, often pushing racist false narratives about people of color.
Another account I chose to highlight was the EndWokeness (@endwokeness) account. Another notoriously racist account almost singularly dedicated to attacking minority communities with (often false) narratives. I’ve highlighted a tweet of theirs on my chart, which dogwhistles that people who are not white males are inferior.
Both of these highlighted accounts are abhorrent, and any public figure who interacts with them should rightly be called out. Elon is interacting with both accounts over once a day on average.
Conclusion
Here are some key takeaways from this article:
- Elon Musk tweets a lot. From 7/27/24 to 9/12/24, he has averaged nearly 68 tweets per day.
- I estimate that he spends ~2.7 hours/day on Twitter using conservative assumptions.
- He constantly interacts with notoriously racist alt-right accounts, like Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) and EndWokeness (@endwokeness)
For better or worse, Elon Musk is one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet. Through SpaceX and StarLink, he has incredible influence on American policy. As a result, I think it’s important to keep him accountable. Hopefully analyses like this can help, by highlighting some of the accounts he routinely interacts with.
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Methodology and Assumptions
This analysis was made possible by a scraper I built that gathers tweets from Elon’s timeline. On Twitter, a person’s timeline displays the vast majority of their tweets, but for unexplained reasons, depending on when you load someone’s Timeline, some tweets don’t show up. I ran my scraper twice, on September 7th and September 16th. I took all tweets that showed up on either scraping attempt. A small number of Tweets from the time period may have fallen through the cracks, but we can consider this a conservative limitation. The given numbers in my figures cannot be any lower. In fact, they might actually be worse.
Furthermore, Twitter lists timestamps in the GMT timezone. For all figures except those that explicitly require timestamps and are sensitive to exact hour/time, I convert these timestamps to CST. That corresponds to the timezone in Texas, where Elon resides and spends the majority of his time.
Ultimately, I was able to gather data from 7/27/24 to 9/12/24 (48 days).