Tired of watching Elon Musk attack the principles behind workplace diversity, the billionaire Mark Cuban joined the fray to defend what is known as DEI.
The two have spent the past month trading jabs on Musk’s X, a social-media platform that has long been full of unfiltered emotions and angry mobs ready to pounce. Their tenors differed greatly: Musk seemed more like a schoolyard bully, Cuban an earnest high-school debater.
“I knew I was entering the lion’s den and would get a lot of negative feedback, but the level of hate surprised me,” Cuban, who is Jewish, told me this past week in an email. “Having Elon call me a racist, moron, chicken, and whatever else he posted didn’t surprise me and, honestly, I didn’t care what he said. But that seemed to open the door for levels of antisemitism and hate that I didn’t expect.”
In reality, Cuban, the former majority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, hadn’t entered the lion’s den; he had entered Musk’s echoverse.
After years of cultivating a universe of online followers, Musk’s reach has grown only stronger with his acquisition of Twitter-turned-X in late 2022 and the introduction of a revenue-sharing program that rewards certain X users for creating content that grabs attention.
Cuban realizes that now. “The echo chamber has figured out that the more everyone replies and agrees with each other, the more reach they get and the more they all get paid!” Cuban posted on X this past week. “Tbh, can’t blame them. Why not take the money?”
The Musk business empire was built, in part, on his ability to motivate and monetize something going viral. He has long eschewed traditional marketing, preferring instead to rely on word-of-mouth to spread the benefits of his products.
Musk and X didn’t respond to requests for comment.
More than 20 years ago, Musk began experimenting with how to go viral with the company now known as PayPal. Then called X.com, the company rewarded users for successfully referring others to the digital payment company, depositing $10 into their accounts for successful converts.
Years later, at Tesla, where he is chief executive, Musk began a similar program to help sell his electric cars. Instead of spending money on TV ads or building more bricks-and-mortar stores, he wanted to mimic what he did at PayPal with a referral program.
“What worked for PayPal may not work for Tesla, but it is worth trying,” Musk wrote in a 2015 memo to customers.
Tesla’s referral program, which has evolved over the years, began by offering a $1,000 credit to a customer’s account to be applied to future car purchases or other company-related expenses. But more than that, customers who successfully racked up referrals unlocked various rewards, such as invitations to company events, the ability to buy limited-edition products, or even a free car.
What might have begun as something intended to be shared among friends quickly became fuel for a ragtag online missionary force for Tesla. Seeking those referrals motivated an already active online fan community to find even larger audiences in hopes of the newly evangelized using their referral codes to buy their own Tesla vehicles.
To this day, vocal Tesla fans on X and elsewhere often include their referral codes in their bios or postings.
For some, the pimping became unseemly. After some Tesla faithful complained it was getting out of control with too many social-media influencers hustling for referrals, Musk in 2017 threatened to rein it in. That drew a rebuke from a prominent enthusiast website called Teslarati, which argued at the time that the complaint wasn’t a case of abuse but of sour grapes.
“Let us not forget that many Tesla-owning YouTubers began their channels with the sole purpose of sharing their love for the company, their cars, and most importantly Musk’s vision of the future,” the blogger Gene Liu wrote.
“As their voice amplified across the Google-owned social video platform and subscriber counts grew, so did Tesla’s brand reach and presumably the number of Model S and Model X vehicles sold each quarter,” Liu wrote.
He conceded that he, too, was guilty of shamelessly plugging his own referral code.
After taking over X, Musk put a new spin on an old idea. He revamped the platform to appeal to content creators as it competes for their potentially viral work against the likes of YouTube, which has its own lucrative revenue-sharing program.
Eligible, verified users get a share of revenue from organic ad impressions displayed in replies to their posted content, according to the terms of X’s program. The company says violating its policy against hateful content can lead to the blocking of posts from having ads adjacent to them.
In recent days, Cuban has been retweeting some of the hateful replies he has been receiving and posts about him, including, “Some Jews, like Mark Cuban @mcuban, just keeps on pushing this anti-White racism. We need to get rid Jewish Supremacists.”
X has said it is making progress in reducing the spread of hateful content, and Musk has stressed that he isn’t antisemitic.