WASHINGTON (AP) — Elon Musk and Donald Trump share bestride-the-colossus egos, an incessant drive to be the center of awareness and a system to showcase their eccentricities and erraticism.

Both the Tesla CEO and the previous president have made use of that platform, Twitter, as a sword and a defend — a soapbox to rouse the passions (and faucet the pocketbooks) of tens of hundreds of thousands of followers and repulse the other side.

Trump weaponized Twitter just before he was banned right after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Musk was a persistent Twitter poster, taunting stock sector regulators and railing towards his version of conformity in various tweets. Then he resolved to invest in the platform.

Now each experience a reckoning this 7 days brought on at minimum in component by their use of Twitter to progress their agendas and feed their outsize id.

Trump is confronted with a decide on congressional committee’s unanimous suggestion to the Justice Division on Monday that he be criminally prosecuted for his element in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by supporters stirred to action that working day by his community remarks, on and off social media.

Right driving that could appear the launch Tuesday of Trump tax returns, now in the arms of a different House panel, that he has invested years combating to keep private.

Immediately after firing about fifty percent the Twitter workforce and sowing chaos with impulsive and ever-altering procedures, Musk in essence requested users regardless of whether he should hearth himself. In an unscientific poll he established up, a the greater part of the 17.5 million respondents mentioned he need to stage down as Twitter chief. No phrase nevertheless whether or not he will honor the outcome as promised.

The tribulations of these two June toddlers, born 25 years and continents aside, may possibly be not like nearly anything thrown at them ahead of.

“The major issue they have in popular is very little practical experience with genuine failure, that is, failure with implications,” explained Eric Dezenhall, a marketing consultant to organizations beset by disaster.

“Even though Trump has failed multiple situations, he’s always been shielded by family members income and remarkable luck,” Dezenhall mentioned. “While Musk is a genius, he’s had the good fortune to have crafted several corporations on authorities funding instead than in the bruising totally free current market.

Tale carries on

“Supplied their life activities, how could these guys not really feel invincible?”

Kindred spirits at least in component, Musk invited Trump again on Twitter shortly soon after he bought it. So far, Trump is sticking with his possess system, Reality Social, which has miniscule get to in comparison.

Musk’s invitation was a selective exercise of the right to free speech, as he also suspended a range of mainstream journalists from Twitter and banned hyperlinks to “prohibited” social media web pages like Facebook, before relenting to some diploma on both equally fronts.

Musk was till a short while ago the world’s richest male, with the amount of money confirmed by the really worth of his stock. Trump has usually argued he really should be considered among the the wealthiest, while powering that claim was a mirage.

Both have operated from a perception that matters start and close by CEO fiat. But Musk has also built viable businesses and authentic prosperity, in distinction with Trump’s record of self-branding, fraught actual estate discounts and doubtful enterprises regarding steaks, vodka or even his have genuine estate investor “university.”

Musk registers 120 million Twitter followers Trump, a Republican, had 88 million when he was barred from the platform after the Jan. 6 insurrection. The web site has vastly amplified each their voices, in a way that has benefited Musk’s businesses and Trump’s political profession in excess of the decades, while at a expense to their reputations.

“A hater hellscape,” Musk known as Twitter in 2017. But it also was a siren’s phone to him.

“On Twitter, likes are uncommon & criticism is brutal,” he tweeted in 2018. “So hardcore.

“It’s fantastic.”

On that system, Musk will come across fewer as the visionary engineer who produced electrical motor vehicles sizzling, builds reusable rockets and cares deeply about local weather improve than as a petty settler of particular scores who can sink into right-wing conspiracy theories and misogyny.

A month back, teasing Trump for keeping out just right after Twitter agreed to permit him back in, Musk posted a depiction of a woman bare from the waist down, with the Twitter brand covering her genitals and Trump, as Jesus, on the lookout on. “And lead us not into temptation,” claimed Musk’s post.

Equally guys have used Twitter to assail the mainstream media, spread misinformation, force the limits of what’s appropriate in social media and have interaction in provocations that can make it difficult to appear absent.

But of the two, only Trump held the ability of workplace. For all his spacecraft, Musk’s universe is a lot scaled-down. In the public-view impact sport, it’s designed up largely of tweets and company Coverage about how to handle them.

Their politics really do not match — Musk’s right-wing and libertarian beliefs appear with a devotion to managing world warming, for case in point, and Trump’s don’t. Their personalities differ in some respects, too — Musk admits error and even apologizes on occasion Trump does not.

Their function ethic bears no resemblance to just about every other.

Trump, a 76-12 months-previous from Queens in New York Town, spends most of his time at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach front, Florida, right after a presidency notable for sufficient time on the golfing one-way links. Musk, a 51-year-aged native of South Africa who lived in Canada as a young male, is known for doing work insane hrs, fingers on, these times in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

But as disrupters, they could possibly as perfectly be twins separated at delivery.

“Both of those of these fellas are totally free-stylers,” said Dezenhall. “There is hardly ever a approach, under no circumstances a approach, just a assortment of on-the-fly methods. This has labored out extremely perfectly for them.

“It wouldn’t be the situation for the relaxation of us.”

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Linked Press writers Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco and Josh Boak in Baltimore contributed to this report.