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If Elon Musk is a name that sounds as if it was invented by Ian Fleming, there’s more than a hint of the Bond villain about the South Africa-born American billionaire. It’s not just the extraordinary wealth, which hovers around the quarter of a trillion dollars mark, but the SpaceX business that sends rockets into space and seeks Martian colonisation (very Hugo Drax and Moonraker) and the hypersensitive ego.

All of these sides of Musk are on painful display in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. So unappealing is the portrait this pair of New York Times technology reporters paint that a more fitting title might be Character Assassination. Or it would if it wasn’t for the fact that Musk himself provides most of ammunition discharged in this damning account.

As the subtitle suggests, the book focuses on Musk’s controversial acquisition of the social media platform Twitter, now renamed X, which the authors describe as “a new, harsher and much more cynical social media company”. It seemed an unlikely development for someone who became the richest person in the world through building extraterrestrial rockets and electric cars, but Musk started out as an internet entrepreneur making his first fortune with an online city guides business, before becoming even more filthily rich from the sale of his share in PayPal.

He was also a Twitter addict, one of those people who couldn’t let a day pass – and often an hour – without posting his opinion or reposting someone else’s. In a previous era the gilded classes liked to demonstrate their affluence and influence with the ownership of newspapers. But as early as 1998 Musk had seen the writing on the screen.

“I think the internet,” he declared back then, “is the be-all and end-all of media.”

Although Twitter wasn’t the be-all and end-all of anything other than cultural warfare, by the end of the last decade it was established as a vital resource for tens of millions around the globe, and the company aspired to rival Facebook. Its chief executive was Jack Dorsey, a curious hippy-billionaire given to gnomic statements, who tried to navigate a path for the platform between the jagged rocks of libertarian principle and liberal concern. It wasn’t an entirely successful strategy, and a divided board eventually encouraged his exit.

His successor, Parag Agrawal, was a devoted technocrat who seemed to believe that all solutions to the toxic social conflicts associated with the platform could be found in better coding. But he never really got a chance to make his mark because he was immediately shown the door when Musk bought the company for $44bn just over two years ago. Or rather he was legally compelled to buy it after making an inflated offer from which, despite his best efforts, he was unable to back out. The court case that clarified Musk’s obligation also revealed a cache of text messages the billionaire sent relating to the acquisition. They show a rash, impatient character given to bouts of intimidation, grandstanding, depression and megalomania.

He practically forced Twitter to sell to him without any due process, and then complained long and hard that he hadn’t had the opportunity to assess the company’s true worth. Nor did he have any kind of coherent plan about where to take the business. He loathed its advertising model, and set about alienating the companies that provided most of Twitter’s income, yet his alternative – raising money through a verification system – was ill-conceived and counterproductive.

The more revenue declined, the more he stripped the workforce, thus losing expertise that in turn stymied efforts to reform the business. As he tweeted six months after the purchase: “How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.”

The justifying cause to which he lays claim is free speech, a noble concept that tends to splinter on impact with complex reality.

While the authors may be a touch too inclined to see any questioning of liberal shibboleths as tantamount to hate speech, there’s little doubt that if Twitter always had its nasty elements it has become a larger cesspool, if smaller business, under Musk.

Throughout it all, with only minor exceptions, he carries on tweeting – or what are we supposed to call it now, X-ing? According to the authors, he became obsessed with becoming the most followed contributor on his own platform, launching a frenzied investigation when the numbers began tailing off, convinced that disgruntled members of the old regime had thrown a digital spanner in the works.

At one point, when a tweet he makes supporting one Super Bowl team gets less attention than President Biden’s backing of the same team, he walks out of the event and flies to San Francisco to oversee efforts to find out how this presidential scene-stealing had been allowed to happen.

There is growing evidence to suggest that social media is deleterious to mental health, and nothing in this book leads the reader to believe otherwise. The kind of polarised and insular thinking that algorithms on platforms such as Twitter/X are primed to spread is in a way personified by Musk, who has persuaded himself that he is on a crusade to save America and the world from what he calls the “woke mind virus”.

It’s not as if there aren’t troubling aspects to some of the more self-righteous social justice movements, but Musk has climbed into bed with Donald Trump, both men citing popular support while being chiefly focused on self-enrichment and the gratification of their overweening vanity.

By the end of this book, you can’t help but feel that Mars may well be the right place for this strange and obscenely wealthy character.

• Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac is published by Cornerstone (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

In the 20th century, the definition of progress seemed clear. It was growth, measured in terms of national income, or gross domestic product (GDP). And that growth was to be endless, an ever-rising curve. No matter how rich a nation already was, its politicians and economists would consistently claim that the solutions to its problems – from poverty to pollution – depended on yet more growth.

But this promise has not been delivered on. It is clearly time to reimagine the shape of progress and, with it, the policies that could bring about prosperity for a fractured humanity on a destabilised planet.

First, it’s useful to recognise the appeal of growth. It is, after all, a wonderful, healthy phase of life, which is why people the world over love to see children, gardens and trees grow. No wonder the western mind so readily accepted it as the shape of economic progress, too, and simultaneously adopted the very 20th-century mantra that “more is better”, both personally and nationally.

Yet if we look to nature, it’s clear that nothing succeeds by growing for ever: anything that seeks to do so will, in the process, destroy itself or the system on which it depends. Things that succeed grow until they are grown up, at which point they mature, enabling them to thrive, sometimes for hundreds of years. As the biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus reminds us, a tree keeps growing only up to the point that it is still capable of sending nutrients to the leaves at the outermost tips of its branches, at which point it stops. Its pursuit of growth is bounded by a greater goal of distributing and circulating the resources that nurture and sustain the health of its whole being.

Although we can easily appreciate the limits of growth in the living world, when it comes to our economies, we have a harder time. Thanks to the availability of cheap fossil fuel-based energy in the 20th century, rapid economic growth came to be seen as normal and natural, indeed as essential. Its continuation over many decades led to the creation of institutional designs and policies – from credit creation to shareholder dividends to pension funds – that are structurally dependent on growth without end. In other words, we have inherited economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive.

This requirement has become so locked into economic theories, political narratives and public expectations that, over recent decades, we’ve witnessed desperate and often destructive measures designed to reboot growth when it becomes elusive. Governments deregulate finance in the hope of unleashing new investment, but often end up unleashing speculative bubbles, house price hikes and debt crises instead. They promise corporations that they will “cut red tape” but end up dismantling legislation that was put in place to protect workers’ rights, communities and the natural world. They privatise services – from water to hospitals – turning public wealth into private revenue streams that often undermine the very services they claim to provide. They add the environment into the national accounts as “ecosystem services” and “natural capital”, assigning it a value that looks dangerously like a price. And, despite committing to keep global heating “well below 2C”, they open up new avenues for fossil fuel exploration, while failing to make the scale of transformational public investment needed for a renewable energy revolution.

Instead of pursuing endless growth, it is time to pursue wellbeing for all people as part of a thriving world, with policymaking that is designed in the service of this goal. This results in a very different conception of progress: in the place of endless growth we seek a dynamic balance, one that aims to meet the essential needs of every person while protecting the life-supporting systems of our planetary home. And since we are the inheritors of economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, a critical challenge in high-income countries is to create economies that enable us to thrive, whether or not they grow.

Tackling and reversing inequality needs to be at the heart of a new eco-social contract. Not only does this bring benefits in terms of improving life satisfaction; it helps us reduce the size of our national ecological footprints, via the well-documented links between greater fairness and more moderate consumption. It’s also important politically: one of the most damaging consequences of growth-driven inequality is the concentration of wealth and economic power in the hands of a few. This power can all too easily be converted into influence over elections and the policymaking process, ensuring the preservation of a system that advantages the already wealthy.

When we turn away from growth as the goal, we can focus directly on asking what it would take to deliver social and ecological wellbeing, through an economy that is regenerative and distributive by design. There are many possibilities – such as driving a low-carbon, zero-waste industrial transformation, with a green jobs guarantee, alongside free public transport, personal carbon allowances, and progressive wealth taxes. Policies like these were, only a decade ago, considered too radical to be realistic. Today they look nothing less than essential.

This is an edited extract from a foreword to The Poverty of Growth by Olivier De Schutter (Pluto). Kate Raworth is the author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (Random House Business).

Further reading

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel (Windmill Books, £10.99)

Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes by Ha-Joon Chang (Penguin, £10.99)

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson (Routledge, £19.99)