Goodbye, Xitter, nice knowing you until...

I've sent my last Tweet. After 16 years and 62,800 Tweets, with up to 70,000 followers, I'm done. It was a great ride, but it's over.

I’m not going to provide my thoughts for free for Musk to train his AI minions. He’ll have to steal them, like all the other tech bros do. Image: France24

Now that Elon Musk’s X.ai has bought Xitter, it’s clear its business model has collapsed into creating free training data for Grok. So I'm done.

Me and Musk

I’ve met Musk three times over the years.

The first was back in 2000, when he was building Paypal, and I was working for Bernard Arnault (later the richest man in the world). I had coffee with Musk and someone who might have been Peter Thiel but was entirely unmemorable. We had a disjointed conversation about payment systems and a potential investment; Musk struck me at the time as being socially awkward.

The second time was in March 2007, when Musk and I were on a panel providing testimony to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

I delivered an overview of global clean energy investment through to 2006 (which is a fun read today), and then talked about what would accelerate it: policy consistency, the use of hedges to reduce commodity risk, accelerating permitting, investing in energy efficiency, and carbon prices.

In his testimony, Musk recommended policy interventions to “lower the cost of production capital, accelerate innovation and catalyze consumer acceptance”, pushing for loan guarantees from the Department of Energy, X-type prizes (which were absurdly popular at the time) and tax credits for EV buyers.

Sadly, the video of the session no longer works - if anyone can get hold of a copy, I would love to watch it. I certainly don’t recall Musk making the argument that the US government needed to be dramatically chopped back.

Our third meeting was at the Copenhagen Climate Finance Meeting in October 2013, where Musk spoke to an audience that included UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, with whom I was working on Sustainable Energy for All (later SDG 7). We said hi and did small-talk for a minute or two.

Musk at the Copenhagen Climate Finance Meeting, October 2013, in the days before he gave straight-armed salutes and demolished aid agencies. Listenting on top table are two Cleaning Up alumni - UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and clean energy pioneer Paddy Padmanathan. Image: Michael Liebreich

Bottom line - while I accept that Musk played an absolutely pivotal role in propelling the EV industry forward, I have never been a fanboy.

I have always been unconvinced by Musk/Tesla’s claims around self-driving (promised by the end of 2016, still a mirage), robo-taxis or sentient android robots. As a former board member of an actual transport authority, Transport for London, I’ve always found the Boring Company… boring. And I find his Mars plans childish.

SpaceX and Starlink are impressive in their technology and market position. But that much power should never be concentrated in the hands of one private person, let alone someone so obviously lacking self-control. The US has dealt with robber barons and monopolists quite effectively in the past, and at some point I hope they do so again.

I have no time for Musk’s Great Human Replacement Theory. I have written extensively about AI, and used it quite a bit, and nothing I have seen makes me think humans are about to be, or should be, swept aside.

Above all, I’m repelled by Musk’s lurch into neofascism - the amplification of white supremacists on social media, the endorsement of far right racist political parties, the attacks on societal connective tissue, the salute.

Life after Xitter

So there you have it. I have no interest in providing free content to help train Grok - which will presumably be as disappointing as Tesla’s “full-self-driving” software which, after five years, is still just glorified cruise control and some way behind the technology’s leaders. I know that my content is being scraped and stolen by AI bros as we speak, I’m not naive. But see no reason to make it easy for them.

I don’t intend to delete my account on Xitter. I’ll lurk occasionally, and might even post the occasional link to some of my content elsewhere. But that’s it. I no longer even have the app on my phone - a trifle weird after 16 years of daily use, but I’m quite sure I can live without it.

There are still plenty of places I publish, and lots of ways of commenting and debating with me (as long as you are in good faith, because otherwise you will get blocked pretty fast these days).

• First, here I am on Substack (though I must say, I have not really got the hang of the difference between Notes, Comments and Chat). This is where I post most of my writing these days, other than the two pieces each year I write for Bloomberg.

• I am fairly active on LinkedIn. All the right people are there, though it is incredibly frustrating. Threading is inexplicably AWFUL. Notifications is full of crap you have already responded to. Search is so poor, you’re better off searching via Google. Old posts are impossible to find. And on my Android phone there’s a bug which means I can’t even add a link to another user. I wish there were an alternative.

• I use BlueSky, where most of the old EnergyTwitter has now migrated, to keep up with the news and clean energy / climate developments. You can find me there as @mliebreich.bsky.social.

• And then, of course, there's Cleaning Up. We are now doing over 1m downloads per year, mainly on the YouTube channel (where there are sometimes good discussions in the comments), but also on any decent podcast platform.

Project Bo on Cleaning Up

In fact, this week's episode of Cleaning Up (airing Wednesday 9 April) is one which producer Oscar Boyd and have I put heart and soul into - not to mention some long layovers in West African airports.

It’s on Project Bo, the solar/battery system a bunch of us built for a neonatal intensive care unit in Bo, the second-largest city in Sierra Leone. The system is helping the medical staff there save hundreds of babies' lives per year.

It’s a much-needed story of clean energy success in tough times. And a reminder that not everyone thinks destroying aid agencies is a good use of their limited spare time!