'Titter' Is Trending Because Elon Musk Is a Child

It was another chaotic weekend on Twitter thanks to Elon Musk, who — among other things — continues to lash out at media organizations he does not like. Not only did he strip the NYTimes of their Verification badge last week, but he has labeled NPR “Government Funded Media” (the label has also been applied to the BBC). NPR only receives 1 percent of its funding from government grants — considerably less money than Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla receive from the government — and has, for now, ceased using their Twitter account because of the label. NPR’s label was originally “US state-affiliated media” and after a back-and-forth with a business reporter on NPR, Musk could not explain why he gave NPR that label. He simply does not know.

Meanwhile, Musk is also amplifying Kremlin-linked accounts and he’s calling attention to — rather than banning — tweets from Russian state officials essentially calling for genocide in Ukraine.

This comes days after Elon Musk disowned his prized citizen journalist Matt Taibbi, temporarily blocked links to Substack, and made the “Twitter Files” unsearchable.

It’s far from the worst offense, but the 51-year-old billionaire also continues to prove not only what a child he is but how incredibly cringey his sense of humor is. To wit, here is his current Twitter name:

At the San Francisco headquarters, Elon Musk changed Twitter to ‘Titter.’ The word actually means a short laugh, but I assume that Musk just likes that it includes ‘tit.’

What I love about this is that it is quintessential Musk: a bad/childish/spiteful idea was complicated by regulation so a worse, half-assed version was done in the laziest, tackiest way possible to deeply embarrassing results he is pathetically proud of. https://t.co/7PwGXoO9my

— Chris Franklin (@Campster) April 10, 2023

Twitter employees work in that office. In fact, showing up to work is mandatory. Walking into the building, they have to be reminded of the kind of buffoon for whom they work.

For what it is worth, not all the news is bad: Elon Musk is also facing the possibility of billions of dollars in fines in Germany for allowing illegal hate speech to proliferate on the platform.

(Publisher’s Note: When possible, we substitute header images of Lee Pace for Elon Musk for aesthetic reasons, with apologies to Lee Pace. But what do we think of the mustache?)