In recent memory, a conversation about Elon Musk might have had two fairly balanced sides. There were the partisans of Visionary Elon, head of Tesla and SpaceX, a selfless billionaire who was putting his money toward what he believed would save the world. And there were critics of Egregious Elon, the unrepentant troll who spent a substantial amount of his time goading online hordes. These personas existed in a strange harmony, displays of brilliance balancing out bursts of terribleness. But since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Egregious Elon has been ascendant, so much so that the argument for Visionary Elon is harder to make every day.

Take, just this week, a back-and-forth on Twitter, which, as is usually the case, escalated quickly. A Twitter employee named Haraldur Thorleifsson tweeted at Musk to ask whether he was still employed, given that his computer access had been cut off. Musk—who has overseen a forced exodus of Twitter employees—asked Thorleifsson what he’s been doing at Twitter. Thorleifsson replied with a list of bullet points. Musk then accused him of lying and in a reply to another user, snarked that Thorleifsson “did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.” Musk added: “Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.” Egregious Elon was in full control.

By the end of the day, Musk had backtracked. He’d spoken with Thorleifsson, he said, and apologized “for my misunderstanding of his situation.” Thorleifsson isn’t fired at all, and, Musk said, is considering staying on at Twitter. (Twitter did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Thorleifsson, who has not indicated whether he would indeed stay on.)

The exchange was surreal in several ways. Yes, Musk has accrued a list of offensive tweets the length of a CVS receipt, and we could have a very depressing conversation about which cruel insult or hateful shitpost has been the most egregious. Still, this—mocking a worker with a disability—felt like a new low, a very public demonstration of Musk’s capacity to keep finding ways to get worse. The apology was itself surprising; Musk rarely shows remorse for being rude online. But perhaps the most surreal part was Musk’s personal conclusion about the whole situation: “Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet.”

[R]ead: Twitter’s slow and painful end

This is quite the takeaway from the owner of Twitter, the man who paid $44 billion to become CEO, an executive who is rabidly focused on how much other people are tweeting on his social platform, and who was reportedly so irked that his own tweets weren’t garnering the engagement numbers he wanted that he made engineers change the algorithm in his favor. (Musk has disputed this.) The conclusion of the Thorleifsson affair seems to betray a lack of conviction, a slip in the confidence that made Visionary Elon so compelling. It is difficult to imagine such an equivocation elsewhere in the Musk Cinematic Universe, where Musk seems more at ease, more in control, with the particularities of his grand visions. In leading an electric-car company and a space company, Musk has expressed, and stuck with, clear goals and purposes for his project: make an electric car people actually want to drive; become a multiplanetary species. When he acquired Twitter, he articulated a vision for making the social network a platform for free speech. But in practice, the self-described Chief Twit had gotten dragged into—and has now articulated—the thing that many people understand to be true about Twitter, and social media at large: that, far from providing a space for full human expression, it can make you a worse version of yourself, bringing out your most dreadful impulses.  

We can’t blame all of Musk’s behavior on social media: Visionary Elon has always relied on his darker self to achieve his largest goals. Musk isn’t known for being the most understanding boss, at any of his companies. He’s called in SpaceX workers on Thanksgiving to work on rocket engines. He’s said that Tesla employees who want to work remotely should “pretend to work somewhere else.” At Twitter, Musk expects employees to be “extremely hardcore” and work “long hours at high intensity,” a directive that former employees have claimed, in a class-action lawsuit, has resulted in workers with disabilities being fired or forced to resign. (Twitter quickly sought to dismiss the claim.) Musk’s interpretation of worker accommodation is converting conference rooms into bedrooms so that employees can sleep at the office.

In the past, though, the two aspects of Elon aligned enough to produce genuinely admirable results. He has led the development of a hugely popular electric car and produced the only launch system capable of transporting astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil. Even as SpaceX tried to force out residents from the small Texas town where it develops its most ambitious rockets, it converted some locals into Elon fans. SpaceX hopes to attempt the first launch of its newest, biggest rocket there “sometime in the next month or so,” Musk said this week. That launch vehicle, known as Starship, is meant for missions to the moon and Mars, and it is a key part of NASA’s own plans to return American astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years.

[Read: Elon Musk, baloney king]

Through all this, he tweeted. Only now, though, is his online persona so alienating people that more of his fans and employees are starting to object. Last summer, a group of SpaceX employees wrote an open letter to company leadership about Musk’s Twitter presence, writing that “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us”; SpaceX responded by firing several of the letter’s organizers. By being so focused on Twitter—a place with many digital incentives, very few of which involve being thoughtful and generous—Musk seems to be ceding ground to the part of his persona that glories in trollish behavior. On Twitter, Egregious Elon is rewarded with engagement, “impressions.” Being reactionary comes with its rewards. The idea that someone is “getting worse” on Twitter is a common one, and Musk has shown us a master class of that downward trajectory in the past year. (SpaceX, it’s worth noting, prides itself on having a “no-asshole policy.”)

Does Visionary Elon have a chance of regaining the upper hand? Sure. An apology helps, along with the admission that maybe tweeting in a contextless void is not the most effective way to interact with another person. Another idea: Stop tweeting. Plenty of people have, after realizing—with the clarity of the protagonist of The Good Place, a TV show about being in hell—that this is the bad place, or at least a bad place for them. For Musk, though, to disengage from Twitter would now come at a very high cost. It’s also unlikely, given how frequently he tweets. And so, he stays. He engages and, sometimes, rappels down, exploring ever-darker corners of the hole he’s dug for himself.

On Tuesday, Musk spoke at a conference held by Morgan Stanley about his vision for Twitter. “Fundamentally it’s a place you go to to learn what’s going on and get the real story,” he said. This was in the hours before Musk retracted his accusations against Thorleifsson, and presumably learned “the real story”—off Twitter. His original offending tweet now bears a community note, the Twitter feature that allows users to add context to what may be false or misleading posts. The social platform should be “the truth, the whole truth—and I’d like to say nothing but the truth,” Musk said. “But that’s hard. It’s gonna be a lot of BS.” Indeed.

Like a local news broadcast or bit of Russian propaganda, the first season of Poker Face portrays the United States as being infested by liars and murderers. Each episode of Peacock’s mystery series depicts such horrors as fratricide and fraud in classic American locales: a Nevada casino, a Texas smokehouse, a Colorado ski lodge. The show’s heroine, Charlie Cale (played by Natasha Lyonne), wields an uncanny, possibly mystical talent for detecting bullshit, whether spewed by hotshot race-car drivers or kindly old ladies. “Everyone, they lie constantly,” she says. “It’s like birds chirping.”

And yet, as this week’s season finale culminated with shots of a highway cutting through amber-toned fields, it inspired a counterintuitive feeling: hope in the American dream. The brutality contained in Poker Face’s 10 episodes is outweighed by humor, humanism, intelligence, and, perhaps most crucially, optimism. The fact that the show is a hit speaks to a hunger for entertainment that counterbalances cruelty and kindness. In Poker Face’s America, justice depends less on vigilantism or the law than on regular people making authentic connections with one another. (I won’t significantly spoil any plot details.)

Poker Face’s message arises from its masterful construction. Each episode begins with the portrayal of a crime; Charlie then fits together puzzle pieces the viewer already comprehends. This means that to make the show entertaining, its creators—the executive producer Rian Johnson and the showrunners Nora and Lilla Zuckerman—had to focus on, well, entertainment. Zippy dialogue, memorable jokes, punchy visuals, and lovable characters supersede rote formulas for suspense. Episodes make time for formal detours (a Smell-O-Vision-like montage, a creature-feature-like sequence) and meandering diner-booth banter. On a deep, structural level, every little detail matters.

[Read: Poker Face has a sting in its tail]

This fits with Poker Face’s divergence from a morally dubious cultural trend: true crime. Whether via a podcast about a real-life murderer or a docudrama about a Silicon Valley scammer, streaming-era storytelling has wrung endless profit from studying terrible people doing terrible things. Nothing is new about gawking at creeps, but the true-crime boom presumes to expose reality while actually distorting it into the shape of a sleek, propulsive thriller. By making criminals so central, series such as Inventing Anna and Dahmer inevitably humanize and glamorize them. Serving secondary roles, victims are flattened into tragic, hapless marks. We’re left with the stylish amplification of a sad truism: Because our society is built on trust, liars—even liars who are also killers—can get very far. These stories present as cautionary tales, but they’re really how-to kits.

In Poker Face, the baddies are humanized as well, but to different effects. The early parts of many episodes zoom in on banal existences: the Peloton-and-delivery-food routine of a rich guy on house arrest, the restlessness of radical activists living in a retirement home. Eventually, these killers’ backstories come to the fore—but usually just to highlight the pathetic hypocrisies that underlie their wrongdoing. Seemingly noble motives for murder—love, vengeance, justice—are discussed, but they tend to be flimsy covers for greed and self-interest. In the season finale, one character makes a speech about how they’re betraying someone else because they’ve been grossly mistreated. But their ultimate incentive for pulling the trigger is to acquire a yacht.

Cutting against such cynicism is Charlie, a raspy-voiced raconteur with an ear for deception and a priestly faith in the goodness of people. She’s drawn into each mystery less by the voyeurism of a true-crime aficionado than by her genuine connections with the people affected (although at one point this season, she does enlist a murder-solving podcaster to help her out). The finale, in which she declines offers of employment from various organizations in need of a truth-sniffer, shows that she stays on the road, helping others, simply because she wants to. By revealing a bit of her backstory and family history, the finale also implies that she has made sacrifices in order to keep using her talents. Like a crusading cowboy or lonely superhero, the price of a righteous life is rootlessness.

Unlike traditional Hollywood heroes, though, Charlie never presumes she can do her work on her own. Each episode, she makes allies who are as sharply drawn as the killer and herself. Mechanics and waiters and drifters are all vested with life through spicy writing and top-tier casting (veterans including Nick Nolte and up-and-comers such as Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Stephanie Hsu make appearances). All too often, one of these buddies turns out to be the episode’s murder victim. The fact that Charlie gets to know them so well makes their death meaningful to both the show’s hero and its audience. It also gives purpose—and a narrative arc—to the side characters who assist Charlie’s crime-solving. Although evildoers exist everywhere, the magic of Poker Face is that it makes them seem outnumbered by decent people.

And magic, to be sure, is a big part of the show. Charlie’s lie-busting powers are inexplicable and unerring, and thus, we must assume, somehow supernatural. So, too, is her pattern (curse?) of stumbling into murder wherever she goes. In the finale, she even acquires a glowing, lewd talisman that guides her quest. Harkening to a time before the true-crime wave, when Columbo and Murder, She Wrote approached grim realities with far-fetched whimsy and heart, Poker Face is lovingly, enthusiastically a fantasy. We don’t quite live in the country the show depicts, but in an odd way, we should wish to.

Texas Tech men's head basketball coach Mark Adams has stepped down from his role, the university announced on Wednesday, days after he was suspended for what the school called an "inappropriate, unacceptable, and racially insensitive comment."